Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A novel set (like the author's Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn) in the sea-soaked world of Nantucket fishermen - a world of savage beauty, violence and death. Apparently an ordinary seaman, the main character is in fact an East German haunted by his experiences among the Muhadjadin in Afghanistan.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Set on the docks of Newport, Rhode Island, this is a suspenseful tale of a reluctant spy named Paul Watkins as he attempts to navigate a stormy relationship and a difficult past. As a young East German soldier named Paul Wedekind, he is recruited by the secret police to inform on his friend Ingo when both are posted to Afghanistan to aid the Russians. Later, in America, he poses as a fisherman to assist the mysterious Suleika in ferrying Russian agents. With the end of the cold War, he adopts a new name and becomes a working fisherman until the past intrudes in the form of Ingo, who commits a murder in a Newport bar. While Ingo functions in the novel as Paul's dark side, the eponymously named narrator makes this a doppelgänger tale in the broadest sense. Recommended for public libraries.‘Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Subtly evocative prose and a convincing first-person narrative may have readers wondering if this tense and absorbing tale of a former East German spy marooned in New England by the fall of communism could actually be true. Paul Wedekind does not know what to expect when the KGB sends him to America to work on a fishing boat and ferry the occasional visitor back and forth between the Rhode Island coast and Soviet submarines. But any assignment would be better than his previous one, the memory of which continues to haunt him. Conscripted into the East German army at 24, Paul was coerced by the Stasi into spying on Ingo Budde, a boyhood friend who turned into a black-marketeer. Stationed in Afghanistan, the two men were eventually captured by the Mujahadeen, who tortured and killed Ingo. Paul was returned in a hostage trade but reported dead and transferred to the KGB. In America, Paul starts a new life with his contact, Suleika, a brave and competent woman with whom he works and shares a common secret. Together, the two will fight the surprising efforts of their past to reclaim them. Watkins (Archangel) uses the most extreme circumstances to test the identities and obligations of his displaced characters as he confides their stories gradually, building sympathy and suspense and conveying a textured picture of the gray world of people caught between two cultures. The ending of this literary thriller is ingenious, with enough twists and turns to make one hope for a movie version. (Apr.) FYI: Picador will simultaneously re-release Watkins's In the Blue Light of African Dreams in paper. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

A sixth novel, both action-packed and curiously muted, from the accomplished young author of such varied and adventurous fiction as Night Over Day Over Night (1988) and Archangel (1996). The protagonist Paul Wedekind relates, both in chronological order and interpolated extended flashbacks, his history as a promising engineering student in his native East Germany, recruitment by the secret police (""Stasi"") to spy on a friend who's suspected of dealing drugs, military service and captivity in Afghanistan under Soviet command, and, following a prisoner exchange, his later service in America for the Russian KGB. He is posted to Newport, Rhode Island, and works on a fishing boat whose owners, Mathias and Suleika Hanhart, are actually smuggling Russian operatives off submarines and onto land for miscellaneous covert activities. But Mathias has recently died, and Paul replaces him as the beautiful Suleika's accomplice in a dangerous series of tasks that comprises a challenging existential adventure. If that sounds a bit overcrowded, then be advised that it's only preparatory to a convoluted story that begins with a violent murder, triggering Paul's vivid memories of the past that he labors to escape, and includes such crisply detailed scenes as a violent nor'easter that sinks their boat, a rendezvous with an old friend presumed dead but apparently unkillable, and a tense climax at sea that represents Paul's last chance to cast off the past, reinvent himself (he has become ""Paul Watkins,"" a U.S. citizen), and make a new life with Suleika. Though it's knowingly plotted, the novel nonetheless bumps rather awkwardly between present action and flashback, and its love scenes--which seem to come out of nowhere--are inert and unconvincing. Another step in Watkins's carefully calculated progress toward becoming our contemporary Hemingway. Not his best, but not half bad. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.