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    The Prodigal Spy
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    The Prodigal Spy
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    The Prodigal Spy
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    The Prodigal Spy

    Written by Joseph Kanon

    Narrated by Boyd Gaines

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    What if the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s had actually uncovered a spy? The bestselling author of Los Alamos returns with a thrilling new novel of suspense, romance, and intrigue.

    Washington, 1950.  The trouble with history, Nick Kotlar's father tells him, is that you have to live through it before you know how it'll come out.  And for Walter Kotlar, a high-level State Department official, the stakes couldn't be higher: an ambitious congressman has accused him of treason.  As Nick watches helplessly, his family's privileged world is turned upside down in a frenzy of klieg lights and banging gavels.

    Then one snowy night the chief witness against his father plunges to her death and his father flees, leaving only an endless mystery and the stain of his defection.  It would be better, Nick is told, to think of him as dead.

    But twenty years later Walter Kotlar is still alive, and he enlists Molly, a young journalist, to bring Nick a disturbing message.  He badly wants to see his son; after two decades of silence and isolation, he is desperate to end his own Cold War.  Resentful but intrigued, Nick agrees to accompany Molly to Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia for the painful reunion.

    Once in Prague, Nick finds a clandestine world where nothing is what it seems--not the beautiful city, shadowy with menace; not the woman with whom he falls in love; and most of all not the man he thinks he no longer knows, yet still knows better than anyone.  For Walter Kotlar has an impossible request: he wants to come home and he wants Nick to help.  He also has a valuable secret about what really happened the night he walked out of Nick's life--and about the deadly conspiracy that still threatens them.

    The Prodigal Spy is a story of fathers and sons and the loyalties that transcend borders, and of a young man's search for the truth buried in his own past, when a national drama was made personal and history itself became a crime story.  Like Los Alamos, this is at once an ingenious mystery, a love story, and a masterly recreation of an era whose legacy haunts our own.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 5, 2000
    ISBN9780553751185
    Unavailable
    The Prodigal Spy
    Author

    Joseph Kanon

    Joseph Kanon is the Edgar Award–winning author of Los Alamos and nine other novels: The Prodigal Spy, Alibi, Stardust, Istanbul Passage, Leaving Berlin, Defectors, The Accomplice, The Berlin Exchange, and The Good German, which was made into a major motion picture starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. Other awards include the Hammett Award of the International Association of Crime Writers and the Human Writes Award of the Anne Frank Foundation. He lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for The Prodigal Spy

    3.5/5

    76 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The writing is excellent. The characters are vivid and the pacing superb. However the plot is contrived, the twists often silly [the same lead character has to be by turns blindly optimistic, blindly credulous, and just plain silly] and the ending is obvious halfway through the book which makes the main suspense guessing how the character will deduce what the reader already knows. Worth a read but probably not worth a second reading.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      This started well, with me believing that I'd finally found something meaty to get my reading teeth into. It seemed an interesting enough story, but the pace was so slow that I began to question the whole thing - why did this loving, caring, intelligent father just up and leave his adored wife and kid to go and live in Russia? Once I started to question the motivations of the characters I needed the plot to pick up and Get On With It, but Kanon was too involved in his characters to deliver on this. Which would have been fine if you could have really believed the plot. I think what I'm trying to say is that the book didn't hang together, and therefore I couldnt get into it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I adore Kanon's story-telling, but I have to admit that this is my least favorite of those I've read by him, much as I enjoyed some aspects of it. While the characters and story were just as compelling as always, the problem was that I saw one of the twists coming... from the very beginning. So while the characters were, for much of the story, focused on solving one huge question, I was trying to figure out if it was so obvious as I thought it was and they were being idiots, or if the answer was something else entirely. Well, needless to say... I'm afraid I guessed whodunit from the start, even if I didn't wholly know the crime at that point. And, it was frustrating. It is true that there were a number of other twists that came at the end, and that I still enjoyed the story, but at least for me, there's a fair bit of frustration in a reader seeing something pretty clearly when all of the intelligent characters are blind to it--and that somewhat ruined the story for me.So, would I recommend this? Well, maybe, with that caveat that it's a bit predictable in some respects, though the characters and story-telling are as engrossing as they are in Kanon's other work. Just don't start by reading this by him. His other work is better, simply put.
    • 1/5
      Entertaining until chapter 61 at which point it ends abruptly. Unfinished.
    • 4/5
      Perfectly readable, and more than interesting enough. Starts out in 1950 with a young boy's father before the HUAC, jumps to the boy in 1969 and a trip to Czechoslovakia (spying, Communists, etc.) and then back to DC/NYC and a run-in with Hoover (spying, anti-Communists!!). Kanon wrote the pretty good GOOD GERMAN.
    • 2/5
      Sometimes a thriller mystery gets too complicated. You get a brain alarm that says whoa and the story stops dead. You are no longer along for the ride. The characters are doing things too hard for mere mortals. That is when the writer needs to go super hero or magical realism or maybe just do a Vonnegut and bring in the little guys in white suits from outer space.Kanon tries way too hard with the plot. Anyone who remembers J Edgar will know you cannot get in to see him. Anyone who knows anything about parents and children and Commies will have problems with the hero and his girl and the parents.But it was fun for two hundred pages. Then I jumped to the end. If you want this kind of stuff go for le Carré. You cannot beat him.

      1 person found this helpful