Reviews for Christopher's Ghosts (Paul Christopher Series #7)

The average rating for Christopher's Ghosts (Paul Christopher Series #7) based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-31 00:00:00 Derek CommonCobin Christopher novel fans will be pleased with Charles McCarry's tenth, and perhaps most coherent, novel in the series. As with many of the Christopher novels, McCarry devotes his attention to Paul Christopher's back story, which has been spun out over so many books that one has to wonder if it has developed over time, or if it was there from the very start. In this novel, Paul Christopher goes back in time to when he was seventeen and madly in love with a Jewish girl in Nazi Germany. There is a predictable, yet heart-wrenching, end to that story. Her loss haunts Christopher, as does his desire to track down the Gestapo interrogator who was responsible for the tragedy. In the second part of the book, we are catapaulted into a "present" (Cold War Germany) in which Christopher eventually comes to grips with his loss, and the man who caused it. In terms of content, Christopher's Ghosts is not McCarry's best book (The Miernik Dossier holds that position), but it is his most coherent and probably the best paced. McCarry's weakness as a writer is that he tends to dawdle around with his plots for 50 or 100 pages before getting down to business. Many readers do not have the kind of patience needed to stick it out until something actually happens. This novel jumps right into the plot and paces itself nicely until the last line. The drawback to McCarry's content - and this has been evident from the start - is that he does not bother to check his facts. In addition to these errors, he tends to populate his books with stereotypes. (Jews are dark and hairy, Nazis are psychopaths, Arabs are terrorists, Africans are primitive "blacks", Guatemalan Indians are hopeless drunks.) I believe that the capitulation to stereotypes comes not from sloppiness, which is clearly the source of his factual errors, but from McCarry's political perspective, which is deeply informed by his former position as a CIA operative. (I have never known a member of the CIA to hold anything other than contempt for the inhabitants of the third world countries in which they operate.) Charles McCarry's finest novels (The Miernik Dossier and The Tears of Autumn) deserve the praise that has been heaped upon them. But as for the rest, they are good reads, but not exceptional.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-12-03 00:00:00 Robert Abbott Well, I don't normally cry at the end of spy/thriller novels, but the last line of this one got me. There are a lot of Nazi-themed novels out there, but I really liked this one because it had a lot more depth regarding familial ties and personal histories of the characters. Someone else's review here mentions how this author tells the story in 300 pages when other authors in the genre drag it out to 600 pages. I agree. I liked not getting bogged down in all the endless details of spy craft and so on. I don't know how I missed this author all these years, but I'm looking forward to reading some of his earlier work.