[.ca] The Cold War Swap (ISBN 0312315813)

First and Maybe the Best:
The Cold War Swap is the first in a long series of excellent mystery/thrillers by Ross Thomas. Thomas's first novel was written during his career as a newsman and public relations expert in many parts of the world. As with all first novels there are a few holes - the one that sticks out most in my mind is the biographical anomaly of main character Michael Padillo - alleged to have been born in 1926 - who after a variegated upbringing by his multi-lingual mother, enters the US Army and "in late 1942 was happily running the bar of an officers' club..." As a veteran myself I found it extremely unlikely that a 16 year old kid would be "running" anything in the US Army. Padillo gets picked for undercover work after someone "browsing through his records" learns that he can speak and write six languages. I'm kind of surprised they didn't discover that he was underage for enlistment at the same time.. In any case the novel is extemely well-written, with sharply defined characters in a classic 50's-60's Cold War "us against them" espionage story. Most of the characters are neither wholly good nor completely evil, and you have some fun trying to figure out which way some of them might bounce. A very satisfying read, well worth checking out from your library if available - a good introduction to the shadowy and shady worlds of money, politics, espionage and government about which Ross Thomas wrote so well during his writing career.