Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 10 reviews on
In the vein of Graham Greene and John le Carré, The Matchmaker delivers a chilling Cold War spy story set in West Berlin, where an American woman targeted by the Stasi must confront the truth behind her German husband's mysterious disappearance.
Berlin, 1989. Protests across East Germany threaten the Iron Curtain and Communism is the ill man of Europe.
Anne Simpson, an American who works as a translator at the Joint Operations Refugee Committee, thinks she is in a normal marriage with a charming East German. But then her husband disappears, and the CIA and Western German intelligence arrive at her door.
Nothing about her marriage is as it seems. She had been targeted by the Matchmaker--a high level East German counterintelligence officer--who runs a network of Stasi agents. These agents are his "Romeos" who marry vulnerable women in West Berlin to provide them with cover as they report back to the Matchmaker. Anne has been married to a spy, and now he has disappeared, and is presumably dead.
The CIA are desperate to find the Matchmaker because of his close ties to the KGB. They believe he can establish the truth about a high-ranking Soviet defector. They need Anne because she's the only person who has seen his face - from a photograph that her husband mistakenly left out in his office - and she is the CIA's best chance to identify him before the Matchmaker escapes to Moscow. Time is running out as the Berlin Wall falls and chaos engulfs East Germany.
But what if Anne's husband is not dead? And what if Anne has her own motives for finding the Matchmaker to deliver a different type of justice?
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Wonderful to see THE MATCHMAKER by @paulvidich and DOUBLE EXPOSURE by #AvaBarry included as Notable Selections on the @CrimeReads list of the best crime novels of 2022! 🔎🥳 https://t.co/AeLqMeKH4U
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@paulvidich returns to the @spybrary podcast to talk about his latest spy novel THE MATCHMAKER... "a story at the intersection of spying and personal lives" Listen to the full episode here 👉 https://t.co/Bp8taKnY5J Buy your copy here 👉 https://t.co/XNnWygyqDP #CrimeFiction
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Happy Publication Day to @paulvidich for his new book THE MATCHMAKER. Paul will take our stage on February 8th at our next Seriously Entertaining. Get tickets at link in bio and buy your copy of the book today in our Bookshop storefront: https://bookshop.org/books/the-matchmaker-a-spy-in-berlin/9781643138657?aid=1787