Matchmaker, The: A Spy in Berlin

In the vein of Graham Greene and John le Carré, The Matchmaker delivers a chilling Cold War spy story set in West Berlin, where an American woman targeted by the Stasi must confront the truth behind her German husband's mysterious disappearance.

Berlin, 1989. Protests across East Germany threaten the Iron Curtain and Communism is the ill man of Europe. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 brings an end to the relentless surveillance of the hated East German Stasi.

The Cold War rages on, though, and the CIA is desperate to find The Matchmaker, a fugitive senior Stasi counterintelligence officer with close ties to the KGB. The CIA believes he can establish the truth about a high-ranking Soviet defector. Is he a bona fide asset or a plant spreading misinformation about a mole high up in the CIA? West German intelligence also want to find The Matchmaker. He ran a network of undercover Stasi agents who married vulnerable women whose jobs gave them access to highly classified government documents.

Anne Simpson appears to be an ideal candidate to help the manhunt for The Matchmaker. She is a translator in the Joint Operations Refugee Committee, which debriefs defectors from the Iron Curtain, and had been married to one of The Matchmaker's Romeos. The Matchmaker is called the man without a face because there are no photographs of him. Anne is the only person who has seen The Matchmaker and she is the CIA's best chance to identify him before he escapes to Moscow.

What the CIA doesn't know, though, is that Anne has her own grudges from the past, and she will work on her own to deliver a different type of justice.

Praise for Paul Vidich

'Vidich perfectly captures the era's paranoid mood' - The Times

'A terse and convincing thriller... This stand-alone work reaches a new level of moral complexity and brings into stark relief the often contradictory nature of spycraft' - Wall Street Journal

'In the manner of Charles Cumming and recent le Carré, Vidich pits spies on the same side against one another in a kind of internal cold war' - Booklist