Nightfall Berlin by Jack Grimwood

Michael Joseph | 2018 (17 May) | 464p | Review copy | Buy the book

It is 1986 and at last there are hopes that the Cold War might finally be about to thaw. Gorbachev has initiated talks to reduce the number of nuclear weapons – if he had his way he’d ban them all – and the world is watching. But it’s business as usual for British Intelligence Officer Major Tom Fox, who has been ordered to East Berlin to organise the return to the west of Sir Cecil Blackburn, a notorious spy who defected to the east many years before. It seems he wants to die at home. But to many in Britain Sir Cecil remains a traitor who still hasn’t paid the full price for his sins. This will be a delicate mission. But the most carefully arranged plans have a habit of falling apart and it’s not long before Fox is on the run, wanted by both east and west for murder.

In order to escape alive, Fox must first find out who is responsible for the crime and why. He must hurry. Anyone who might be able to help is being silenced at a merciless rate. The stakes are high, the consequences of failure devastating.

Nightfall Berlin is the second Cold War thriller by Jack Grimwood to feature Major Fox and, although I haven’t read Moskva (yet!), this didn’t affect my enjoyment of Nightfall Berlin at all. Grimwood introduces Fox and his world perfectly, revealing little bits about his wife and son, making it clear how central to his life they are, even though he is forced to spend most of his time away from them. As a result of that, and various other things, this is a family in crisis and Fox’s worry about this is there as a shadow in the background all the way through the novel. I thought this was done brilliantly. It’s not laboured, it’s enigmatic and mysterious, there is an absence in Fox’s life.

But then we get on to the main business of the book and that is a Cold War thriller that had me glued to the pages. This is fantastic stuff! We follow Fox as he moves through a vividly realised East Berlin, tracked by Stasi agents, and then there are the spies, both Russian and British. In this world it’s hard to trust anyone. But there is even more to this story than the fractured Berlin of the 1980s. This is a city that can’t escape the past and the end of the Second World War. There’s a legacy from those days that hangs over this world. It’s a fascinating story.

As you’d expect from an excellent Cold War thriller, this is a complex, involved and tense novel. The reader must stay alert and is rewarded for their attention. We meet so many men and women with extraordinary stories to tell. But at the heart of the novel lies Major Tom Fox whose past haunts him every bit as much as Berlin is haunted by its own past.

I loved Nightfall Berlin so much that as soon as I finished it I bought Moskva, a thriller set in Cold War Moscow. I’m now hooked on Major Tom Fox and this series. If you have any interest at all in this most fascinating period of modern history then I suspect you will be too.

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