{"id":7940,"date":"2019-05-13T08:27:01","date_gmt":"2019-05-13T12:27:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7940"},"modified":"2019-05-13T08:27:10","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T12:27:10","slug":"the-fourth-courier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7940","title":{"rendered":"****The Fourth Courier"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

By Timothy Jay Smith \u2013 Take a walk back in time to Warsaw,\n1992, with Timothy Jay Smith\u2019s new crime thriller. The Cold War has recently\nended, but average citizens struggle to figure out the new economic realities.\nNothing quite works yet, and the gray concrete dullness of Soviet brutalist\narchitecture is made even harsher by the dismal April weather. Politically, old\nrelationships are unraveling, and chaos in the former Soviet Union and some of\nits satellites raises an important question, who\u2019s watching the nukes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Warsaw police, meanwhile, are dealing with a baffling series\nof murders. Over just a few weeks, three unidentified young men have been shot\nto death, their bodies abandoned on the banks of the Vistula River, one cheek\nslit open, all labels expertly cut from their clothing. Now they\u2019ve found a\nfourth victim, older this time. By chance, the forensic pathologist noticed the\nthird victim\u2019s hands bore traces of radiation. Whatever he\u2019d been smuggling, Poland\u2019s\nnew Solidarity government wants help to stop it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

American aid comes to them from the FBI in the person of Jay\nPorter, who in turn calls on the expertise of the local CIA officer\u2014a gay black\nman named Kurt Crawford\u2014and the genial Ambassador. There are good interactions\nand good humor among the three Americans. They all want to put an end to what seems\nto be nuclear material being spirited out of the former Soviet Union\u2014but each\nhas a totally different way of going about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Porter meets an attractive Polish woman, Lilka, who, he\nlearns, is divorced from her abusive husband, but the apartments in Poland are\nso few and so small, so they still live together. The American starts seeing\nLilka, which gives author Smith a vehicle for introducing realistic aspects of\neveryday Polish life\u2014the shortages, the cranky cars, the small indulgences, and\nthe stresses immediately post-communism\u2014one of the most interesting aspects of\nthe book, in fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps there are a couple too many plot coincidences and\nintersections among the cast of characters. All of them remain distinctive and\ninteresting, though, even the minor ones. Smith\u2019s well described settings put\nyou right in the scene, whether it\u2019s the drably elegant hotel favored by a\nYugoslav general, a seedy bar in the bowels of the train station, or the riverside\nwasteland where the corpses keep washing up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>Photo: \u201cSoviet buttons\u201d by seitbijakaspars, creative commons license.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Timothy Jay Smith \u2013 Take a walk back in time to Warsaw, 1992, with Timothy Jay Smith\u2019s new crime thriller. The Cold War has recently ended, but average citizens struggle to figure out the new economic realities. Nothing quite … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7941,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****The Fourth Courier - after the collapse of the Soviet Union, who's watching the nukes?","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,54,193,40,126,359],"tags":[1563,1562,1561],"class_list":["post-7940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-espionage","category-fiction","category-reading-2","category-review","tag-central-europe","tag-the-fourth-courier","tag-timothy-jay-smith"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Soviet-buttons.jpg?fit=266%2C376&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-244","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7940"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7942,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7940\/revisions\/7942"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}