The New York Times Book Review - Charles Finch
…[a] panoramic, smart, hugely enjoyable thriller…Alexsi twists out of countless dead ends, and Christie does, too; each time his tale seems to be drawing into a cul-de-sac, he pulls it sharply and headily in some new direction…Alexsi shifting between passports, killing easily when he must, trying to balance the ruthless spymasters who would be delighted to sacrifice his disloyalty to the state. "Ugadat, ugodit, utselet," Alexsi tells himself. "Sniff out, suck up, survive." This is a subject too little acknowledged in thrillers, the gift that some people have for life, for going on living. Because of his (marvelously credible) character, Alexsi's survival seems both impossible and inevitable. The spy novel keeps trying to save the world, but the beauty of A Single Spy, what makes it a truly great example of a genre that has not lately been very good at all, is how closely it sticks to Alexsi's crucial, statistically meaningless survival, the slight cant of his personhood.
From the Publisher
"Narrator Ari Fliakos crafts unique voices and personas for key Russians and Germans in this pre-WWII spy story. ...As characters reappear, listeners will appreciate Fliakos's earlier efforts to define every person. By the novel's unpredictable ending, listeners will be completely hooked on Fliakos's every word." -AudioFile
"A superb spy novel, with a vast sweep across the Eastern Front of World War II, all told from the vantage of a single man fighting to survive, while also perhaps changing the course of history." —Chris Pavone, New York Times bestselling author of The Expats
"A rousing adventure saga and a first-rate spy novel. Exciting action scenes. Accurate espionage tradecraft. This irresistible historical thriller grabbed me with its fascinating depiction of little known, major events in WWII. Its unusual main character, a double agent for both the Soviets and the Nazis but looking out only for himself, is a wry deadly charmer." —David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of Ruler of the Night
"Christie paints not only a brilliant portrait of a daring young spy, but also of an explosive era. Taut, expertly plotted, and with an ingenious climax, this is a spy thriller for the ages." —Dan Mayland, author of The Colonel’s Mistake
"A Single Spy is a brilliant and beautiful novel that places William Christie firmly in the rarefied ranks of the world's finest authors of espionage fiction. Readers who've appreciated the dark, wonderfully written novels of John le Carré and Alan Furst, owe it to themselves to read it. The novel is that rare; Christie is that good." —Dan Simmons, New York Times bestselling author of The Terror and The Crook Factory
"To write a World War Two espionage thriller as chilling as A Single Spy, and to capture what it takes to survive bloodthirsty dictators, William Christie is either a brilliant novelist and gifted historian, or he is a 93-year old veteran of the Soviet and the Nazi spy services who has the memory of an elephant and the soul of a wolf." —Justin Scott, New York Times bestselling author of The Shipkiller and Rampage, and co-author of the "Isaac Bell" series with Clive Cussler
"Aleksi is a breath of fresh air, a survivor for the ages who must live by his wits even as he is squeezed by the tyranny of both Stalin and Hitler. William Christie renders him convincingly, in tight, lucid prose with vivid period detail.” —Dan Fesperman, author of The Letter Writer
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-02-07
Alexsi, the protagonist of Christie's latest novel, is a wily 16-year-old hustler and thief in 1930s Russia. After he is arrested, turned into a spy, and forced to become a Soviet double agent in Nazi Germany, his gift for self-preservation is tested to the max.The NKVD, the Soviet secret police, gives Alexsi no choice: he either does their bidding or gets disappeared in a Moscow prison cell. In various acts of self-defense, using a concealed knife, he has already demonstrated his capacity for violence. And he speaks German. But he needs to be trained in other areas—including on-the-job sex. "In order to achieve longevity you must think of something that repels you," his instructor tells him, preparing to demonstrate on a helpless peasant girl. Following his training, the Russians send him to Munich, where, assuming the identity of the long-missing nephew of a top Nazi official, he puts his prized ability to impersonate Germans among native Germans to use. After surviving the invasion of Czechoslovakia with a Prussian Berlin infantry unit, he is assigned to military intelligence in Berlin. There, he works under unsuspecting intelligence legend Wilhelm Canaris. Even as Alexsi is sending coded messages about German military plans back to the Russians, he is assigned by his German superiors to infiltrate the 1943 Tehran conference attended by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—and orchestrate their assassinations. Inspired by an unsubstantiated but tantalizing account detailing this alleged plot, dubbed Operation Long Jump, Christie makes the story believable while treating readers to the escapist pleasures of imaginative fiction. The book gathers steam early on when, escaping a skirmish between Russian and Iranian Shahsavan forces in Soviet Azerbaijan, young Alexsi is awed by the " paths of light in the darkness" created by newfangled Russian machine guns. Christie never squanders that momentum. Alexsi may be an opportunist, but the jaded quality that characterizes many spy novels is nowhere to be found. Part bildungsroman, part history lesson, part political exposé, Christie's enthralling novel defies expectations while striking all the chords that make spy fiction so enjoyable.
