Customer Reviews

With my knives I know I'm good (Red mask mystery)

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So ...I take it home and immediately go to Amazon.com to see if "Julian Rathbone" has ever done anything else, or might be instead a clever psuedonym employed by Graham "Robert Markham" Greene or another. Surprisingly, I found Mr. Rathbone alive and well.

But I would not have been surprised to find Greene's pen, or in fact LeCarre's or Deighton's, behind this superb cold-war thriller which features an escapee from a Soviet "cultural exchange program" (read: circus) who goes on the lam because of the unfortunate coincidence that his twin brother is a hard-boiled assassin-for-hire.

Soon he is in the middle of double- and triple-crosses, and hunted by the Russians, the Americans, and the Israelis. The book has the philosophical, downbeat feel of the great George Smiley/Bernard Samson classics and deserves a second look. The pages were literally falling away as I sped through this undiscovered espionage classic.