Left out in the cold

BEGINNING with 2003’s “The Bridge of Sighs,” Olen Steinhauer has followed detectives from the People’s Militia as they’ve investigated three decades’ worth of murders in a fictional Eastern Bloc country. In the process, readers have been privy to the frustrations, betrayals and backstabbing they’ve endured (and sometimes instigated). These men include “Bridge’s” idealistic rookie Emil Brod’s investigation of a songwriter’s murder, a doomed detective-novelist caught up in 1950s Soviet repression (“The Confession”) and devious Brano Sev, who does double duty as a spy for the country’s KGB-like Ministry of State Security (“36 Yalta Boulevard”). Brano has always cast a pall over the series, and his actions have driven the stories into morally ambiguous territory, earning Steinhauer favorable comparisons with Graham Greene, John le Carre and Alan Furst. Yet his novels retain enough elements of classic detective mysteries so that he can, more or less, keep a foot in both camps.

Now comes “Liberation Movements,” which expands Steinhauer’s literary landscape in a number of important ways. He juxtaposes two very different locales and stories -- that of Peter, a hapless student caught trying to escape Czechoslovakia during the failed 1968 reform movement, and the story of the explosion of a hijacked commercial airliner bound for Istanbul, Turkey, in 1975. As if the dual story lines and locations weren’t difficult enough to juggle, readers familiar with the series will find that one of the militia squad’s members, Libarid Terzian, is on that flight en route to an Interpol conference. The Armenian’s presence on the plane raises intriguing questions: Is he a secret sympathizer with the Army of the Liberation of Armenia, who hijack the plane? Is it a coincidence that he encounters Zrinka Martrich, who may or may not be a militiawoman but certainly seems to know more about him than she should?

Seeking answers, Emil Brod, now head of the People’s Militia, sends Brano Sev and his new partner, 29-year-old Gavra Noukas, to Istanbul to investigate. Even though the case is not in their jurisdiction, the two men decide that, since the hijackers boarded in their capital, the best way to honor their comrade Terzian’s memory and fulfill their duty is to reconstruct the hijackers’ last days in their homeland and turn the information over to Turkish officials.

The combination of old spymaster and younger detective energizes a series whose characters, on the job for almost 30 years, one feared could be getting a little long in the tooth. Part of the charge comes from the pair’s very different personalities -- Brano is a cold, calculating mentor while Gavra is a passionate man who is “always falling victim to that word Brano enjoyed harping on -- sentimentality.

“ ‘It is,’ Brano had told him numerous times, ‘the demise of all good operatives, resulting in the most fatalities. But you’re young. You just don’t understand yet.’ ” Another young addition to the militia and integral part of the team is Katja Drdova, 24 and the only woman in the unit. Driven by a tragedy in her early life, Katja is obsessed with being successful and painfully aware of “the condescension from [her] workmates.” She too is mentored and manipulated by Brano in ways too intricate to reveal here but diabolical and effective nonetheless.

“Liberation Movements” also goes beyond the tighter point of view of the previous novels to give readers five different perspectives, three of them from the militia plus the young woman Zrinka, who plays a pivotal, if incredible, role in the action. But Steinhauer saves some of the most unsettling chapters for Ludvik Mas, a ruthless yet memorable character whose tradecraft and surprising connections to the events of 1968 as well as to Brano, Katja and even Zrinka are doled out in deliciously suspenseful doses.

Beyond the expanded relationships of these principal characters, Steinhauer does a good job of evoking Istanbul’s bars and bazaars, hotels and churches, which form the backdrop for the team’s search for the men who set the hijacking in motion. He also provides just enough background information on the genocide of a multitude of Armenians by the Turkish militia in 1915 to understand why the crimes still feel so personal to these young terrorists more than 60 years later -- and why they could spur the real-life assassination of two Turkish consuls by an Armenian American in Santa Barbara in 1975.

And the echoes Steinhauer creates between the motives of terrorist groups like the fictional Army of the Liberation of Armenia, the real-life Red Army Faction and others of that day (and, by extension, those of our own) are unexpectedly chilling. Perhaps it is, as one character says, that “[t]he political, in fact, is really only the personal dressed up in more flamboyant clothes.”

With its plots and counterplots, secret identities and tradecraft taken straight from the Soviet playbook of the day, “Liberation Movements” is an entertaining, if sometimes implausible, read that should put Steinhauer squarely in the front of the pack of today’s espionage writers. And with complex, engaging characters like Gavra and Katja carrying on the work of Emil, Libarid, Brano and the older hands, it is an exhilarating and enjoyable ride. *