December is the month where I get the most new books, the rest of the year I’m happy to get to spend hours hunting through boxes in the garage or visiting second hand book stores (there aren’t that many new cold war novels coming out at the moment) and this December these are some of the books I got:

The Tiger Man of Vietnam – review coming later in the new year – ok-ish

The Paris Vendetta by Steve Berry – one of those books you put down after 30 pages and you keep meaning to pick it up again, but instead you pick up an old Calvin and Hobbes book or something else and I fear I may never finish this.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale – not being ungrateful but why did Santa put this in by stocking? Yes, I have quite a narrow range of reading at the moment, but this? It has a review by John le Carre saying “A classic” and Ian Rankin “Terrific”. Will give it a shot.

Up Country by Nelson de Mille – borrowed from an ebay seller that I know, who may now have to sell this book second hand. Will it be as good as de Mille’s Honour?

Commando collection – All guns blazing – Santa knows what I want. When I was a child I lived next door to a boy who was the same age and he was a spoilt brat, you know the sort of spoilt brat who shouts and stamps his feet at his parents when he is 15 years old, however his only redeeming feature was that his parents bought him the whole back catalogue of Commando comics and the old subbuteo teams. His parents, apart from that, were horrid, he was a brat and his younger brother was worse in every way. They were the sort of people that you understand what Mr Smith talks about in The Matrix that people are like a virus, but these were an orange bigoted stupid and totally pointless type of virus. I do like how you can be nasty to people through the internet and never see them again.

However, I opened Red Omega and the more books I read, the more I question reviews, especially by authors, that appear on covers of book, so it was with trepidation that I started reading this novel by John Kruse (Did he do The Saint too or is it another John Kruse? David Foster?). This book has the following quote:

“What a book. Ingenious. Original. Spellbinding. My heartfelt applause for several hours of magic” William Diehl author of Sharky’s Machine.

I read a William Diehl book recently called 27, which was about a super-Nazi actor, a master of disguise who is in deep cover in America waiting for the signal to launch a master-stroke and keep the Americans out of the war. That book was awful, and it left me feeling a bit grubby as Diehl seemed to try and write his teenage masturbatory fantasies which clearly involved violence towards woman. In Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho you became tolerant or de-sensitised towards the violence and sex and after awhile it became a bit passé and clinical, where 27 was just a bit icky. Has anybody seen American Psyco 2 with Mila Kunis and William Shatner? Any good?

Yet surprisingly, I actually enjoyed Red Omega. It was one of those novels where the author presents an alternative version of history, in this case the death of Stalin and the subsequent promotion of the American agent Beria. There are good and bad alternative histories out there, some like Seven Days to Petrograd by Tom Hyman are a bit rubbish to be honest, where John Birmingham’s WW2.0 are very good (I found 2.1 a bit confusing during the merge and maybe there were too many central characters in that book, before they were subsequently culled in the later books).

In Red Omega it follows the story of General Joaquin Cabezza, who was a General in the defeated Communist/Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and I know my ignorance of the Civil War is showing here, but did they have a proper army or was it just loose brigands and reporters like Philby watching from the sidelines? I still find it amazing that Spain was a fascist country till the 1970s, where now they are a bit third world in places and suffer constant invasions from the British holiday makers and their seaside culture. My idea of hell is ending up in a crowded beach in Magaluf surrounded by drunken sunburnt idiots called Shazza and Bazza, wearing their en-gur-lund football tops and I can only eat in a British style fish and chip shop and if I happen to bump into a local I must speak slowly and loudly in English as that is the way you speak to these stupid foreigners. These holidaymakers have a type of mindset that I can’t understand, just like my Brother-in-Law who wears a certain UK football strip in Australia as he is proud to be “showing the colours”.

Anyway, the Civil War is over and Cabezza smuggles himself back into Spain to find his family, but he gets captured by the Spanish and gets locked up. He escapes, but only gets as far as the prison car-park construction site, with a gun with very few bullets and is surrounded. The Americans step in and save him on the proviso that he agrees to assassinate Stalin. Cabezza obviously agrees, and who wouldn’t if you were surrounded and to add extra motivation it’s a chance for pay back to what happened to Cabezza when he was last in Russia. Cabezza gets re-built by the Americans through some brain washing and intricate planning and goes off to Moscow to try and kill Uncle Joe, the mad man of steel.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: I think this could be an American win.

Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : Some miners strike as a minor strikes, prison break, MKB gay death or is it?, a rough game of squash, some Kremlin sneaking about, fights in alleyways, apartments and train stations.

Believability of the goodies: Joaquin Cabezza Well sketched out, didn’t posses too many super-human powers as some protagonists seem to have, yet he still managed to have the greatest spy lover cliché, very good back story and it was good how the author seemed to justify where he fits in the story and how he got there.
Gail Lessing: Took a few beatings for the team, mostly believable, but suffered from the female fiction disease where she falls easily in love with the protagonist, bit moralistic, but not enough to be jarring, and well worth her star on the Wall.
David Kelland: He was your puppet-master, master of disguise type. Absolute git, but his sole objective was to get mission success so he would happily sacrifice everything and everyone to get it done. Not a nice man, but you need these lack of empathy or sociopaths to win the Cold War. Believable.
Holtz: This was you Dungeons and Dragons elf-like CIA executioner. Like Kelland, had no empathy, and slept like a baby after killing. He too is not a nice man, but he too is indispensable in the Cold War fiction fight.

Believability of the baddies: Grechukha. Not really a baddie, rather he was on the opposing side. He wasn’t demon-ised too much as your cold heartless Soviet killing drone, rather you felt the system created him and thus his actions. It’s always refreshing when the Soviets aren’t simply cardboard cut-outs who only act a certain way, where at least John Kruse made the effort in introducing the character and explaining his motives..

Very good book, well worth putting aside a good few hours and reading it. It’s more of your winter type reading novel, rather than Australian summer, however I found drinking Pimms and wearing sunglasses as the book described the snow in Moscow didn’t distract from enjoying it. It also makes you think what really happened in the the days after Stalins death, I’m not saying Cabezza was successful in his mission, but the fall-out and the in-fighting within the Central Soviet system would have been immense. If I was the Americans, would I have risked flooding East Germany with tanks in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death? Maybe, it’s tempting.

After this enjoyable read, I’m off to wallow in Commando’s “Donner und blitzen”, “Achtung”, “Gott im himmel!”.