A PRODIGAL SPY: JOSEPH KANON

I must like Kanon because this is the fourth book I have read by him. The book begins in the 1950's during the Mc Carthy trials, outing supposed communists in the various government offices. A young Nick Kotlar learns of his father's questioning via the newspapers and gossip.  When it appears as if he's going to be convicted, the father, Walter Kotlar disappears and in his wake, leaves behind a wife and son.

The novel jumps ahead twenty years, the 1970's when Nixon is still in office.  Nick has served a stint in Viet Nam, has come home disillusioned by the war, his government, and its leaders.  Since his father's exit, Nick's mother has remarried an old friend of his father's, Charles Warren, who has adopted Nick as his son.  He also happens to be a diplomat currently involved in the Paris Peace Talks with Viet Nam.  Nick's in London, doing research for a professor's book on the Red Scare when he meets a reporter, Molly Chisholm, at a party.  She actually has been looking for him, as he finds out later because she had recently been in Prague and has brought a note for Nick.  It's from his father, asking if Nick will come to Prague to see him.  Nick at first refuses to go but rethinks his refusal when Molly agrees to go with him.  They soon become a couple, the romance of the book, and they end up in Prague, just after the Russians have clamped down on the dissidents, not a very peaceful time.  They are nervous passing from Austria into Czechoslovakia, then Prague, and the city, the people, all appear to be in the dark, figuratively as well as literally.  The city, compared to the rest of Europe, looks run down, unkempt despite having been spared by the Nazis.

Nick meets his father, his step mother, and whatever Nick held against his father disappears as the two two reunite. Walter is dying and wants to return to the States, to clear his name and find out who gave him up to the FBI.  He's positive the mole is still alive and working against the States.  Clearly, Walter is disillusioned with whats happened in Russia, especially during the Stalin era.  Nick agrees to help his father, waits for him at the train station but he never appears.  He then takes his car to his father's house and finds that he's been killed.  The local police arrive, assume Nick is the murderer but he is cleared by a sympathetic police superintendent and allowed to leave before the Russians find out about his connection to his father.

He returns to the States, with Molly and between the two of them, they discover the mole who betrayed Nick's father.  I won't say who it is but by the end of the book, we all have a pretty good idea who he is.  The ending is a bit complicated, as the reader finds out because the discovery of the mole only makes Nick's world worst.  A good read.