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The Cold War Swap
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Product Description
Minotaur is proud to publish The Cold War Swap with The Fools in Town are on Our Side in the second installment of Minotaur's planned rerelease of Ross Thomas's works, following on the heels of Out on the Rim and Briarpatch. The Cold War Swap received both an Edgar Award and the Mystery Writers of America Award for Best First Mystery Novel of the Year. With these rereleases, Minotaur is honored to bring readers the thrillers they deserve, thereby delighting Thomas's fans and introducing him to those readers who may not know what they are missing. In The Cold War Swap, Saloon owner 'Mac' McCorkle runs a popular bar in Bonn, Germany. He becomes the cloak and good friend of a very suave, multilingual, and lethal dagger named Mike Padillo. Late of the OSS, Padillo is the man they send out on the little 'jobs' that never make the papers. His assignment in the 'Swap' is to bring back defectors from the NSA (No Such Agency, at the time) through Checkpoint Charlie. Unfortun-ately, anything that could go wrong does, and McCorkle is soon on his way to help Padillo through the assorted mayhem, kid-nap-ping, murder, and the odd double- and triple-crosses.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #236871 in Books
- Published on: 2003-04-29
- Original language: English
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
"America''s Best Storyteller." (New York Times Book Review )
Ingram
McCorkle crosses over into the Soviet Bloc in search of his friend, Michael Padillo, a part-time tavern owner and full-time spy who has disappeared in East Germany. Reprint. NYT.
About the Author
Thomas died in 1995, and since then all but one of his twenty-five novels have gone out of print. This should never have happened to the man of whom The New Yorker has said "Very few...are as consistently entertaining...even fewer can match him for style and power." Minotaur is proud to remedy this situation by reissuing Thomas's novels. So start reading, and prepare to join Ross Thomas's legions of admiring fans.
Customer Reviews
First and Maybe the Best
The Cold War Swap is the first in a long series of excellent mystery/thrillers by Ross Thomas. Thomas's first novel was written during his career as a newsman and public relations expert in many parts of the world. As with all first novels there are a few holes - the one that sticks out most in my mind is the biographical anomaly of main character Michael Padillo - alleged to have been born in 1926 - who after a variegated upbringing by his multi-lingual mother, enters the US Army and "in late 1942 was happily running the bar of an officers' club..." As a veteran myself I found it extremely unlikely that a 16 year old kid would be "running" anything in the US Army. Padillo gets picked for undercover work after someone "browsing through his records" learns that he can speak and write six languages. I'm kind of surprised they didn't discover that he was underage for enlistment at the same time.. In any case the novel is extemely well-written, with sharply defined characters in a classic 50's-60's Cold War "us against them" espionage story. Most of the characters are neither wholly good nor completely evil, and you have some fun trying to figure out which way some of them might bounce. A very satisfying read, well worth checking out from your library if available - a good introduction to the shadowy and shady worlds of money, politics, espionage and government about which Ross Thomas wrote so well during his writing career.
