By: “Kirkus Review”

“Kirkus Review” — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:16:39 +0000

“Prolific thriller specialist Allbeury … backtracks in a rather nostalgic bit of historic fiction about a loyal communist who spent his life in the US spying for a glorious USSR that never existed. “Based on truth” and covering a cold war that has ended, leaving no doubt about the outcome, this is more memoir than thriller. Motherless little Andrei Aarons follows his father, a Jewish glove-maker and loyal communist, into Parisian exile in the last days of the Romanovs. Spotted as a comer by the Bolsheviks on their way to power, Andrei gets sent to spy school and a lifetime assignment as the Soviet man on the scene in New York, where, with his loyal communist French wife, he sets up as a bookdealer and political spy. Although he’s expected to run the usual nuts-and- bolts espionage and crack the whip over the American communist cells, his speciality is soon seen to be his ability to read the Americans and interpret them for the leaders in Moscow. Admiring the optimistic Americans among whom he lives but steeped from infancy in the purest Communist theory, the keenly analytical Aarons is uniquely able to understand and predict US opinion on and reaction to anything the Muscovites might come up with, including the treaty with Nazi Germany. When WW II ends and Stalin’s expansionist madness increases, Aarons, who has never lost the communist vision, becomes concerned for world peace and – thanks to the machinations of a Wall Street lawyer and a Franco-Russian CIA employee – steps into a role as personal interpreter of the Russians for Truman and then, years later, for Kennedy. He seems to have been largely and frequently responsible for the avoidance of WW III. Allbeury, a Briton, never gets American speech nailed down, but his heart’s in the right place. This is gentle reading for pensioned cold war soldiers”. Kirkus Reviews

By: Len Deighton

Len Deighton — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:14:45 +0000

“Ted’s writing reflects his own eventful life and the tragedies that have scarred him. The way in which his four-year-old daughter was stolen from him, and the lengths he went in his searches for her, is as dramatic as any fiction anyone ever invented. His adventures in the real world of espionage are even more astounding than those he writes. His compassionate treatment of the enemy and the almost inevitable sadness of the finale have become something of a Ted Allbeury trademark. And yet there are always surprises and it’s a bold reader who tries to predict the end of one of Ted’s stories.” Len Deighton

Comments on: Ted Allbeury, Show me a Hero

By: “Kirkus Review”

By: Len Deighton