Overview
Bestselling author Katherine Reay returns with an unforgettable tale of the Cold War and a CIA code breaker who risks everything to free her father from an East German prison.
From the time she was a young girl, Luisa Voekler has loved solving puzzles and cracking codes. Brilliant and logical, she’s expected to quickly climb the career ladder at the CIA. But while her coworkers have moved on to thrilling Cold War assignments—especially in the exhilarating era of the late 1980s—Luisa’s work remains stuck in the past decoding messages from World War II.
Journalist Haris Voekler grew up a proud East Berliner. But as his eyes open to the realities of postwar East Germany, he realizes that the Soviet promises of a better future are not coming to fruition. After the Berlin Wall goes up, Haris finds himself separated from his young daughter and all alone after his wife dies. There’s only one way to reach his family—by sending coded letters to his father-in-law who lives on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
When Luisa Voekler discovers a secret cache of letters written by the father she has long presumed dead, she learns the truth about her grandfather’s work, her father’s identity, and why she has never progressed in her career. With little more than a rudimentary plan and hope, she journeys to Berlin and risks everything to free her father and get him out of East Berlin alive.
As Luisa and Haris take turns telling their stories, events speed toward one of the twentieth century’s most dramatic moments—the fall of the Berlin Wall and that night’s promise of freedom, truth, and reconciliation for those who lived, for twenty-eight years, behind the bleak shadow of the Iron Curtain’s most iconic symbol.
Review
Luisa is a codebreaker for the CIA. She comes across a symbol on a letter and she knows she has seen it before. She begins to go through her grandfather’s office and discovers a past she didn’t know she had!
Luisa is a character which broke my heart in places. But, don’t let her situation get to you. She pulls out all her talents and gumption to save the father she never knew! And I loved her for it!
I love how the author entangles the past with Luisa’s present. The way it unfolds about her father and the way her grandfather molded her to be a codebreaker really had me all up in this drama. My emotions were all over the place.
Give me a book with family lies and secrets, written well, and set in the Cold War, and I am hooked! I have not read a Cold War book in ages. I remember when the wall came down. I stayed up late one night and watched. The author captures all of this and it is not something you will soon forget.
Y’all know I love a tag team of narrators. And this book has some of the best! Saskia Maarleveld, Ann Marie Gideon, P. J. Ochlan are great on the accents and all the drama!
This is my first five star read for March! Y’all do not miss this one! Grab your copy today!
I received this novel from the publisher for a honest review.
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