Customer Reviews

Nocturne

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Reading Nocturne will take about a day and it will be a day well spent, in my opinion. On one level Nocturne is a spy novel set against the backdrop of an economic summit in Venice during the late 1980s. Charectors, each with their own agendas, wage shadowy war against one another with the highest stakes imaginable. On another level, though, Nocturne is a mediation on friendship, redemption, and revenge.

Two of the most interesting charectors in the novel are not the spies, but the musician and doctor couple, ordinary people who are thrown into a situation far from ordinary. They are forced to draw upon strength neither thought they had. Think about Jimmy Stewert and Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much and you'll see what I mean.

Indeed, Hitchcock in his prime could have made a splendid movie from Nocturne.

This story of Cold War suspense seems to be relatively unknown, but very satisfying to read. It's about a plot to kill the leaders of the seven top industrialized countries during an economic summit in Venice, in 1987. As far fetched as that sounds, the authors make it seem so plausible that one wonders how close history may have come to taking a very ugly turn indeed.