Here’s a review of the
paperback Mission: Prague, the first
in the Tana Standish series:
There’s a particularly nifty
twist to this espionage adventure, set behind the Iron Curtain in the
mid-1970s. The smart, sexy female protagonist isn’t just a rare survivor from
Warsaw’s WW2 ghetto. Nor is she merely a highly skilled covert operative,
brought up by the British military establishment to be extremely effective
against the KGB and its cohort agencies when she’s behind enemy lines.
Nope, Tana Standish has one
more thing going for her: psychic talents.
These attributes don’t make
her an invulnerable or less-than-credible superwoman. They’re neatly
underplayed, a talent which isn’t understood or entirely controllable but which
frequently tips the odds in her favour.
This mild shift into the land
of ‘maybe’ is carefully contrasted with the grim, grey reality of life in
Czechoslovakia in the Seventies, brought to heel seven years earlier by Soviet
tanks, its citizens stifled by the relentless brutal mechanisms of an efficient
totalitarian regime. An underground resistance cell has been compromised; a
British agent fled and the Czechs are scared. Tana is assigned to put the
network back together and use her special talents to ascertain if comms have
been compromised, or worse.
The result is a running chase
through the back streets and sewers of Prague, where the protagonists barely
taste their black bread and spicy sausage between violent and amorous
encounters….
The best scenes are the one-on-one
confrontations, claustrophobic closed room battles of expert second-guessing.
One particular superb scene is beautifully choreographed and delivered,
dragging the reader into the sweat-soaked reality of being stalked by a
stronger killer… a simply chilling chapter, the best in the book, where Tana
must marshal all of her mental strength to resist the worst (and it is very
bad) that her opponents employ against her…
Mission: Prague
is a rollicking read, an intriguing mix of action-adventure, actual events and
augmented espionage.
Thank you, reviewer Rowena
Hoseason!
Available from Amazon as an e-book or paperback: http://authl.it/B06XFY7LLV
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