The Prodigal Spy
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Boyd Gaines
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By:
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Joseph Kanon
About this listen
What if the Communist witchhunts of the 1950s had actually uncovered a spy? The best-selling 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 20 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.
©1998 Joseph Kanon (P)1998 Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, A Division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Anders is an angry, cynical man. A book critic known for his scathing reviews, he finds any excuse to dismiss, belittle, or insult. This afternoon is no more agitating than the next. Angers finds himself in a long line at the bank, waiting to reach a teller. Even after two men - wearing masks and carrying guns - take control of the building, Anders is unfazed. It's this behavior that lands him with a pistol against his stomach and a man screamingin his face. And when the bank robber, indignant over Anders' behavior, shoots the book critic in the head, his mind floats through the memories of his life, settling on one particular event....
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The Perfect Example
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Adam Lang has been Britain’s longest serving—and most controversial—prime minister of the last half century. As pressure mounts for Lang to complete this memoirs, he hires a professional ghostwriter to finish the book. As he sets to work, the ghostwriter discovers many more secrets than Lang intends to reveal, secrets with the power to alter world politics - secrets with the power to kill.
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Too close to the truth?
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Heist Society
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Since she can remember, Katarina's relatives have been grooming her for the family business - thieving. But when Kat tries to go straight and leave the Life for a normal life, she's promptly kicked out of her new school for stealing the headmaster's car and mounting it on the school fountain. Although she could have done it without breaking a sweat, ironically, this time, she's innocent.
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Fun listen!!!
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Somewhere in the once-placid streets of San Francisco, a young man is on the run, charged by the media with a crime he didn't commit, hounded by demagogues, hunted by a desperate police department. One cop knows that Kevin Shea is innocent of a brutal racial murder. An ambitious politician will use Shea for her own ends. And a down-and-out lawyer is all that stands between Kevin Shea and an even more atrocious crime. For when there's no law left, justice is the only hope.
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Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report. Someone has shattered the sanctuary of a remote yeshiva community in the California hills with an unimaginable crime. One of the women was brutally raped as she returned from the mikvah, the bathhouse where the cleansing ritual is performed.
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Good Read
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Robin Ballantyne's life is finally coming together. After learning she was pregnant with twins and being abandoned by her irresponsible boyfriend, Adam, she's settling into life as a single mother. But one night, after putting the children to bed, she hears an argument and suddenly, a body falls past her window. Running outside, she finds the body of Paula Carmichael, a renowned activist.
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New York Times bestselling author Alan Furst is widely recognized as master of the historical spy novel. Furst’s works are vivid evocations of long-forgotten heroes and feature plots that unfold to the inexorable cadence of history. Night Soldiers is a simultaneously thrilling and illuminating tale of espionage set in 1934.
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Best Alan Furst novel!
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Who exactly is Danziger? He's a writer of letters for illiterate immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side - "a steadfast practitioner of concealing and forgetting" for his clients, and perhaps for himself: He hints at a much worldlier past. What and whoever he really is or has been, he has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city and its denizens. And he knows much more than the mere identity of the floating corpse.
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Mobsters and Cops, NYC, 1942
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1987. There’s only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that’s her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down. But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life - someone who will help her to heal....
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worst protagonist ever
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Laguna Heat
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Laguna: a place where a crazed killer has turned paradise into a Disneyland of depraved violence - with a fiery vengeance - and where homicide cop Tom Shephard unravels a grisly mystery. It reaches back across 40 years of sordid sex, blackmail, and suicide into the dark corners of his own past.
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Fabulous
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Berlin, between the two world wars. When an executive at the renowned Ufa film studios is found dead floating in his office bathtub, it falls to Nikolai Hoffner, a chief inspector in the Kriminalpolizei, to investigate. With the help of Fritz Lang (the German director) and Alby Pimm (leader of the most powerful crime syndicate in Berlin), Hoffner finds his case taking him beyond the world of film and into the far more treacherous landscape of Berlin's sex and drug trade.
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Masterful
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When a body is hauled from the River Tyne, Sarah Tucker heads to Newcastle for a closer look. She identifies the dead woman as Private Detective Zoë Boehm, but putting a name to the corpse only raises further questions. Did Zoë kill herself, or did one of her old cases come back to haunt her? Coincidence is an excuse that soon appears pretty unconvincing. Sarah can’t leave until she’s found the answers to her questions, however dangerous they might turn out to be.
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What a disappointment
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What listeners say about The Prodigal Spy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Liga
- 06-26-12
Good story, poor quality presentation
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
The book is great -- would recommend the hard copy since the poor quality of the recording really detracts from the enjoyment of hearing the story. The sound quality was poor (very muffled, scratchy), the background music was screechy and caused me to yank out my ear plugs several times. The narrator was great, but his voice, etc. suffered because of the bad production level.
Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?
Joseph Kanon is a terrific writer, I always enjoy his books -- they are tightly written, take unexpected turns, one can really get "into" the characters -- this was no exception. This book, like "The Good German" presents unique situations from unique perspectives, presenting an interesting (and educational) look at a political situation that has sometimes been stereotyped in pop movies and books...
What didn’t you like about Boyd Gaines’s performance?
I thought Boyd's performance was good -- the production was awful & the full impact of his performance could not be appreciated properly.
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
Depends -- the movie of "The Good German" was a sore disappointment, so don't know.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Christy Rhodes
- 09-19-13
Lousy Sound
Liga is right. I'm going to ask for a credit because the sound is so bad.
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1 person found this helpful
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- enya keshet
- 05-07-19
A nice spy story
Kanon must have a winning receipt, as this one follows the same lines as his "Defectors". Unfortunately, this audiobook file had bad vocal problems I expect Audible to attend to.
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Overall
- Julia Aryeh
- 03-11-05
very Bourne Identity ish
the plot is complex and historically interesting. there are a lot of components and hidden agendas making this listen absolutley intriguing. this is the only book I have read by him, but it was a terrific "listen" and the reader does a good job. Definitely an old school style novel that is a pleasant change from some of the more recent "trying too hard" novels.
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2 people found this helpful
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- BurghMan
- 11-18-23
Confusing plot.
I am still not sure understand it. Maybe a second listen will clear it up.
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- K.
- 02-08-12
Great story, poor quality audio
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
I've read the unabridged print edition of this book and enjoyed it; thought I would try the audio version on for size. The narration is good, but the audio quality is severely distorted. At first I thought they were deliberately imitating a 50s-era newsreel audio track, but it quickly became clear that something is just not right with this one.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-28-19
Not happy
The narrator wasn’t reading like it was writ I couldn’t follow along in my book he would whole paragraph not very considerate of the reader
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Overall
- Placeholder
- 07-13-15
Bad audio
this recording had garble issues so I gave up on it. not recommended by me. the story may be fine.
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