Rating: 
Summary: great spy yarn
Review: I fell in love with Kanon's dialogue in Los Alamos but found myself ignoring the love story and wanting more mystery. The Prodigal Spy was much more to my liking in this respect. The dialogue is great, not cheesy and mundane like most books these days. The story between father and son is gripping. Normally I'm not interested in this type of story, family redemption and so on, but this book somehow made it not only work, but made it interesting. The cold war setting is well layed out, and his descriptions of Prague and its Big Brother way of life are eerily well written. It's this middle section of the book, when the protagonist visits his father in Prague and is accused of murder, when he must deal with lack of freedom in a communist state and find a way out of his mess, that really proves Kanon's ability to tell a great story. The ending seemed too quick paced, and sadly it was pretty easy to figure out who the killer was(the last five pages do contain a nice twist though). All in all I highly recomend this to anyone who likes a great history oriented story, and of course, a good old fashion spy yarn.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent story, enjoyable from beginning to end
Review: I found this book to be a fasinating novel. My first read of Joseph Kanon. It makes me want to read more of his.
Rating:
Summary: A Match for "Los Alamos"
Review: I like to play Tai Pei for relaxation. One of the beauties of the game is that one can see a necessary piece, but one cannot remove it until other pieces, which partially cover it, are removed. This book, like its predecessor, shows its evil persona from the start, but uses many twists and turns before the dramatis persona is fully exposed to the other characters. I found it most interesting that Sen. McCarthy and Roy Cohn were not portrayed, but a nice portrait of J.Edgar Hoover was crucial to the denoument. Degrading Cardinal Spellman to a mere Monsignor was also a nice touch. The lead Congressman seems based on Parnel Thomas, of HUAC fame. There was an American diplomat who defected to the Czech Republic; and the declassification of the Verona cables makes it clear that there were GRU/NKVD couriers during the immediate post WWII era. This book raises an interesting "What If?" Alger Hiss had fled when Whittaker Chambers pulled the microfilm out of the pumpkin? Again if one likes Columbo and Tai Pei, this book will delight. On the other hand, if one likes the complete surprise of Murder She Wrote, or Sherlock Holmes, then this is not for you. Definitely a must for Fu Manchu, Diagnosis Murder, but Clarence Darrow was a shirt-tail relative!]
Rating: 
Summary: I couldn't put this book down!
Review: I liked this story so much that I stayed up until 3am two mornings in a row to finish it, even though I had to be at work at 9am both days!I particularly enjoyed the Prague portion of the story; having been there during the post 1968-pre 1990 period, I was definately able to relate to much of the paronia of the priod. I recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Very good with a lousy ending!
Review: I thought Los ALamos was an amazing book--so well written and really captured the time and place of the Southwest at the end of WW II. I was greatly looking forward to this book and the first 3/4 met my expectations. I kept hoping against hope that the ending would not be what seemed soooo obvious in CHapter 1 so I was very disappointed at the trite conclusion. Kanon has the ability to relate so well a time and place that I knew little about with a great story as the hook but this time the story just fails the reader at the end.
Rating: 
Summary: A disappointment after Los Alamos
Review: I was such a big fan of Los Alamos that I looked forward to The Prodigal Spy with pleasurable anticipation. But I was deeply disappointed on several levels. I found the story inherently less interesting and the plot too predictable. I guessed both of the villiains, and I don't especially congratulate myself; they were too obvious. Secondly, one of the true strengths of Los Alamos was how vividly Kanon evoked the physical setting of the Southwest and the camp where the atom bomb research was conducted. Aside from a few passages about Prague and the Czech countryside, I thought that in The Prodigal Spy, Kanon was much less interested (and thus much less successful) in describing the environments in which his story developed. That's important because those details convey a sense of verisimilitude, and their absence makes The Prodigal Spy that much barer. My final criticism is that I was simply much less interested in the topical background of the story. Although the issue of genuine espionage versus false denunciations in the immediate post-war era was important at the time, in the post Cold-War era, all of the post- Communits era novels about the battle against Big Red have suffered because they portray battles against a dead straw man. In short, a spectre haunts the spy-story biz, the spectre of no more Communism, or at least no more Communism that matters.
Rating:
Summary: An Intriguing Look at the Abuses of Power
Review: If you are like me, you thought you knew what you thought about the Red hunts in Washington in the early 1950s and about Soviet spying activities since then. Joseph Kanon changed my perspective completely by focusing on Nick Kotlar, the son of a man accused of being a Soviet agent by the House Un-American Activities Committee. As the book begins, Nick is ten and his house is surrounded by reporters every morning before his father heads to the Capitol to testify. As the story continues, Nick plays a determined hand in trying to understand what was going on . . . and what it all meant. The book becomes an amazing story of finding oneself by sifting through the ruined lives of the older generation. The book is in three sections (in Washington D.C. in 1950, in Europe 18 years later, and back in the United States shortly thereafter). The first two are riveting and tremendously rewarding. The final section is far too predictable to work well. I recommend that you read the book, nevertheless. You can actually skip the final section if you want. I think I would have liked the book better if I had. I listened to this book rather than read it. The version I listened to was the unabridged one by Books on Tape. Michael Kramer does an impressive job with the different characters by altering his voice more than I thought possible. Some of the voices he does for the people in Czechoslovakia are brilliant! Try to listen to this version if you can. After you finish reading or listening to the book, think about where today power is being used to create harm and deny freedom of choice. Where is it being done by totalitarian regimes . . . and where by democratic ones? What are the differences? How can such abuses of power be eliminated?
Rating:
Summary: An Intriguing Look at the Abuses of Power
Review: If you are like me, you thought you knew what you thought about the Red hunts in Washington in the early 1950s and about Soviet spying activities since then. Joseph Kanon changed my perspective completely by focusing on Nick Kotlar, the son of a man accused of being a Soviet agent by the House Un-American Activities Committee. As the book begins, Nick is ten and his house is surrounded by reporters every morning before his father heads to the Capitol to testify. As the story continues, Nick plays a determined hand in trying to understand what was going on . . . and what it all meant. The book becomes an amazing story of finding oneself by sifting through the ruined lives of the older generation. The book is in three sections (in Washington D.C. in 1950, in Europe 18 years later, and back in the United States shortly thereafter). The first two are riveting and tremendously rewarding. The final section is far too predictable to work well. I recommend that you read the book, nevertheless. You can actually skip the final section if you want. I think I would have liked the book better if I had. I listened to this book rather than read it. The version I listened to was the unabridged one by Books on Tape. Michael Kramer does an impressive job with the different characters by altering his voice more than I thought possible. Some of the voices he does for the people in Czechoslovakia are brilliant! Try to listen to this version if you can. After you finish reading or listening to the book, think about where today power is being used to create harm and deny freedom of choice. Where is it being done by totalitarian regimes . . . and where by democratic ones? What are the differences? How can such abuses of power be eliminated?
Rating:
Summary: A Cracking Good Read for the Money
Review: In a contemporary book world dominated by the macabre, the distasteful and the sappy, it's wonderful (and rare) to find a genuinely entertaining read. Kanon's prose flows swiftly and he excels at building tension into many scenes, particularly those in Prague. These qualities warrant forgiveness for the all too transparent ending and the occasional glitch that greater attention to the research might have avoided. (The Mayflower Hotel--or any other DC hotel--doesn't have 16 floors and the Soviet Embassy isn't on Embassy Row--it's downtown.) Yet Kanon vividly captures the essence of Prague in the 60s (though how he fails to mention Hradcany Castle is beyond me). These are small irritations. A larger disappointment is that the reader is more likely to remember the action at the train station in Prague than the characters who played the scene or their motivation. OK, OK. I'd like to have it both ways--memorable characters in a tightly-woven, suspenseful plot--but these days, you're lucky to get even one of them. Kanon gives us a very good read for the money and I'm thankful for that.
Rating:
Summary: A Story of Deceit, Lies and a Prodigal Bond
Review: It is 1950 and the House Un-American Activities Committee accuses ten-year-old Nick's father, Walter Kotlar, an undersecretary at the Department of State, of being a Communist spy. Nick finds out by seeing him being interrogated by congressmen on the newsreel while at the movies. He refuses to believe it, but his father leaves little doubt when he flees the country in the shadow of the suspicious death of a young woman who testified against him. Jump ahead to the late '60s, and after serving time with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, Nick is in Europe with his stepfather, Larry, who is in Europe to represent the U.S. at the Paris peace talks to end the war in Vietnam. Nick has put his real father, who has since turned up in the Soviet Union where he admitted to being a spy and had received the Order of Lenin, behind him. While in Paris Nick meets Molly, an American hippie type, who tell him his father is now living in Czechoslovakia and wants to see him. In Prague Nick's father tells him that he had been betrayed and framed for murder. He also tells him he wants to come home and that he'll give up the names of spies still operating in exchange for life in America. Nick and Molly go to Washington to search out the spies fingered by Nick's father, including one highly placed agent named Silver, who has been selling out his country for decades and who Nick believes is responsible for many deaths. And now this spy named Silver may even be after Nick. Mr. Kanon has written a super mystery-thriller that tells the sordid story of McCarthyism as you burn the midnight oil, eagerly reading through the pages to see what comes next in this tale of intrigue that has an ending I guarantee you won't see coming.
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