MAX IN THE CAPITAL OF SPIES
One moment, Max Fredericks is standing in Volkspark in Berlin in 2021, searching for his tutor, Brady. The next, Max finds himself in East Berlin during the Cold War in 1965…where he’s in over his head. All he has to go on is a message that Brady sent to him, decades in the future: “Volkspark West. 10:15, where wolf and girl meet.” Part of this message soon makes sense when he sees a girl being forced into a van. After a moment of frozen indecision, he decides he’ll help the girl by mounting a rescue mission. He reaches the logical conclusion that the girl had been abducted by the Stasi, the East German secret police. So, armed only with the research he’d done before his trip, Max marches straight to Stasi headquarters, which he’d recently toured with Brady in 2021. His brilliant plan is to volunteer to be a double agent for East Germany in exchange for allowing himself and the girl, nicknamed Elsa, to leave after he completes one mission. This being the height of Cold War paranoia, however, little goes the way that Max hopes. The strength of Capone’s work is the thorough research that informs his depiction of 1960s East Berlin and the authenticity it adds to his narrative; he’s set a high bar for historical backdrops in future volumes in this series. Any book with a fantastical element such as time travel requires a healthy suspension of disbelief—Capone’s debut novel requires more than most. Are readers to believe that a temporally displaced 17-year-old American can outfox the entire communist security apparatus largely by himself, with a little help from his allies? Hopefully, Max’s next time-leaping adventure will be slightly more realistic.
