COLD VICTORY

In his new novel, Marlantes moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the spectral tundra of a very cold Cold War–era Finland.

It’s 1947. Arnie Koski, a U.S. Army colonel, has a delicate mission: As military attaché in Finland, a tributary state to Nazi Germany during the war but now a buffer against an increasingly inimical Soviet Union, he has to keep a bunch of constituencies happy, not least the Pentagon brass. Arnie’s wartime friend, a Soviet officer named Mikhail Bobrov, is now his counterpart in Helsinki, with a different agenda but the same need for tightrope-walking skills. Their wives, Louise and Natalya, who form a careful friendship of their own, share that need, too. Louise is sometimes overwhelmed but no-nonsense, for “Army wives [are] used to getting things done alone.” The soulful, cautious Natalya’s life is more complicated still, for she lives under the doubtful eye of Oleg Sokolov, a colonel in the secret police, who monitors every step the Bobrovs take. For all that, Arnie and Mikhail hatch a friendly-wager plot to race by skis across northern Finland in February, perhaps not the smartest but certainly a suitably macho scheme. Alas—and here Marlantes’ rather relaxed narrative picks up speed—Louise and Natalya take the contest up a notch, with Louise sketching out a press release: “Two war heroes, friends and allies, making money for a joint Soviet-American orphanage project.” When, thanks to subterfuge, it actually lands in the hands of the press and the contest is widely publicized, governments get involved—and, naturally, things get ugly. Marlantes is better than Tom Clancy when it comes to the human element, but he’s similarly fascinated by militaria (“a Shpagin could fire a thousand rounds a minute”) and historical detail. All in all, it’s not John le Carré or Alan Furst, but it serves.

A few longueurs aside, there’s enough cat and mouse here to keep Cold War thriller buffs engaged.