Last year, Wilson won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for A Small Death in Lisbon. He is one of the newer guys on the block, in the posse headed by Sheriff John le Carre and top gun Alan Furst. Because of the ending of the Cold War Furst and Wilson have gone back into the past to pen their espionage yarns, both of them more or less using the same timescale - before, during and after the second World War - and the same locations - bleak, grey, dangerous Europe.
In this new novel, our author charts the course of two lives, on the one hand that of Karl Voss, charge d'affaires at the German embassy in Lisbon, and on the other the often tortuous tribulations of Andrea Aspinall, a trained British spy. Although on radically opposing sides, they meet and fall in love, a happenstance that adds further resonance to their already complicated lifestyles.
In a big novel containing many different strands, Wilson never loses control of the various manipulations needed to bring his story to an apt conclusion. His scene-setting of wartime Lisbon, where he places the bulk of his narrative, is meticulous: the past may be a different country, but his imagination manages to inhabit it comfortably.
In the latter part of the book, the scene changes to Berlin at the time of the collapse of the Wall, with the tendrils of conspiracy reaching out of the past to prevent the star-crossed lovers from enjoying a benign and peaceful old age.
Wilson employs a slightly out-of-focus prose style that eminently suits his tale of intrigue and double-dealing. There is no doubt that he is a promising writer, his novel operating on many levels, to divert and to tease the intellect of his readers. Watch his star, for it is surely in the ascendent.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic