Dead Ground: A Novel - Hardcover

Seymour, Gerald

3.8

316 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684854767 ISBN 13: 9780684854762

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1999

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Spy fiction its best: A mission of revenge, a haunting love story, and a chilling tale -- in the definitive novel of the end of the Cold War. Celebrated for his "palm-sweating tension" (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times) and "rare insight" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), Gerald Seymour has scored bull's-eye after bull's-eye with readers and critics. Now, crackling with suspense and finely realized characters, Dead Ground floodlights an East German Stasi as chilling at the collapse of the Communist world as it was throughout its reign of terror. One frozen night, Tracy Barnes witnesses the killing of her lover by the secret police. Years later, when the Wall has crumbled and old enemies have become new friends, Tracy encounters the murderer and plans to make him pay. But in a country still at war with itself, Tracy finds that she is being played as a pawn in a far bigger game of revenge that reaches all the way to Moscow. In Dead Ground, exposing some uncomfortable truths behind one of recent history's most important political transitions, Gerald Seymour shows himself to be a truly unique talent.

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Review:

Gerald Seymour is the smartest writer of international thrillers in the business. His books might not have all the literary trappings of a le Carr� or the pretensions noir of a Deighton, but they are much more real and immediate. They read like stories ripped from foreign newspapers and fleshed out by a reporter with brains and a heart.

Dead Ground begins with a frightening incident at a British military base, when a female corporal savagely attacks a visiting German dignitary and accuses him of murdering her East German lover nine years before. The German, Dieter Krause, a former officer of the notoriously evil East German intelligence service called the Stasi, is close to the new chief of the Russian Army. Any scandal surrounding the two men could endanger relations among Russia, England, and America. The new, united Germany very much wants the whole incident to go away. As a marvelously pragmatic British agent named Perkins sums it up:

They're the power and the glory. We bend the knee to them. We grovel rather than offend 'greater' Germany. We slobber at the ankles of their chancellor, their Central Bank, their foreign ministry, their industrialists....

But the enraged British corporal, Tracy Barnes, doesn't know how to grovel. She heads off to the former East Germany to find evidence of Krause's crimes, trailed by a legal clerk named Josh Mantle who specializes in lost causes. They find a country still living through its own version of the cold war, a place where victims of Stasi brutality are afraid to rake over the ashes of the past. In scene after harrowing scene, Barnes and Mantle encounter the walking dead, people whose lives have not been improved by being part of a new Germany.

With Dead Ground, Gerald Seymour has found an innovative way to resurface the resentments and atrocities of the cold war. --Dick Adler

About the Author:

Gerald Seymour spent fifteen years as an international television news reporter and is the author of sixteen novels, many of them United Kingdom bestsellers. Several have been made into television movies in the United Kingdom and the United States. He lives in Bath, England.

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