THE TRISTAN BETRAYAL

From the ranks of dead bestselling authors comes yet another probable bestseller.

So peaceful, the grave. No distractions, no need to keep up with the world. No pressure to update the information. No arguments with editors. This is how it must have been for Barbara Cartland in those last golden 50 years, when she was so practiced she simply dictated books from the comfort of one of her several Louis Quinze settees. In fact, a posthumous Ludlum reads almost like a manly Cartland. If there is a waist, it will be tiny. If there is a buttock, it will be tight. If there is a Vichy hostess, she will be a tart. And if there is a plot . . . . Well, of course there is a plot. This is, after all, a Ludlum, so there are layers upon layers of oh-so-reliably nasty Nazis and Bolsheviks against whom is pitted one rich handsome Ivy League polyglot straight-shooting Russo-Yank intelligence agent, Stephen Metcalfe, whose exciting impersonation of an Argentine playboy in Paris in 1940 is interrupted by an assignment to Moscow, where Metcalfe is to test the leanings of the debauched German aristocrat attached to the Reich’s embassy to see if he might be turned. Or so Stephen has been told. But nothing is as it seems, for—and here the late hand of the master reaches for one of the great metaphors of ’80s spycraft and its supporting literature—there are mirrors upon mirrors. The repulsive nobleman is currently the protector of Svetlana “Lana” Baranova, beautiful star of the Bolshoi and a Great Love among the many loves in Stephen’s busy past. (Not out of his 20s, the lad seems never to have slept alone). As corpse after corpse falls in his path, some garroted by a sadistic (of course), violin-playing SS officer with exceptional olfactories, some just blasted by the Bolsheviks, it dawns on Stephen that his masters are simply using him to get to Lana, who will herself be used. The fate of the democratic West is at stake!

Nurse, another lap robe, there’s a good girl.