THE WILLIAM MAZ PAGE: THE BUCHAREST DOSSIER, optioned for film & THE BUCHAREST LEGACY: Rise of the Oligarchs

THE BUCHAREST DOSSIER
WILLIAM MAZ (Bill Hefflin #1)
Oceanview Publishing
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Bill Hefflin is a man apart—apart from life, apart from his homeland, apart from love

At the start of the 1989 uprising in Romania, CIA analyst Bill Hefflin—a disillusioned Romanian expat—arrives in Bucharest at the insistence of his KGB asset, code-named Boris. As Hefflin becomes embroiled in an uprising that turns into a brutal revolution, nothing is as it seems, including the search for his childhood love, which has taken on mythical proportions.

With the bloody events unfolding at blinding speed, Hefflin realizes the revolution is manipulated by outside forces, including his own CIA and Boris—the puppeteer who seems to be pulling all the strings of Hefflin’s life.

The Bourne Identity meets John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A time and place explored as the events I saw unfold with my own eyes were shocking and appalling me and my compatriots will always make a story I want to read.

I've had decent luck with Oceanview's choices of stories they publish so far. This one is a first novel, as almost all the others of theirs I've read so far have been. As a first novel, I felt this was very promising in terms of the choice of story to be told but less so in its structure. Is ir a sentimental education? Is it a spy thriller? Is it a long-term migrant returns tale? A love story? Pick any two. The issue for me was that the author and editor tried to fit way more plot in than the story could support.

"Bill"/Fili (his childhood nickname) in his college years and his recruitment dragged me down the hardest. It's true that I don't care if straight people get hooked/hooked back up very much. I still can read about the characters, if I'm invested in them; but I saw Catherine, the college girlfriend, as a creepy, nasty person, deeply self-centered, and I felt she didn't ever care for Bill except as and when he could be useful. The lost childhood girl-friend was so generic as to be pointless as a character, almost so much so that she was a poor Maguffin. It damned near gets him killed several times, this obsession with women who don't exist except in his imagination. No subsequent revelations or events changed my opinion, either.

What worked for me was the evocation of the time and the place...a world on the cusp of a violent ending, a culture about to prove (yet again) the absolute inescapable truth of the aphorism "To every birth its blood." There is, in each increasingly menacing occurrence, a mounting sense of Bill's being in a place that is dangerous, that could claim him as its next victim. A creeping sense of dread is always useful in a spy thriller. It was present in every part of the Romanian settings of the story. Bill's discoveries about his place in the CIA, and nature of the US interest in the country's future path, all lead him to reassess a lifetime of hurts and hopes as a last-minute rooftop decision point changes him, his essential self, irrevocably.

When we reach the end of this story, the chickens of wars long past and of debts long since exchanged for the gift of a life out of reach to thank the giver for a life unearned come home to roost. The resolution was...pat...but the consequences meted out were condign, so I landed more on the forgiving snd accepting side of the story's ending. It was not a foregone conclusion that I would forgive the w-verb-bombings and the ethnic-slur pepperings and the heterosexism...but I did. That speaks volumes in the story's favor.

I considered it a qualified success, though I warn readers about the convenient-reveal ending.

There's a really interesting development on the way: THE BUCHAREST DOSSIER is now optioned for film adaptation by Cody Gifford, Kathie Lee Gifford's son.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE BUCHAREST LEGACY: Rise of the Oligarchs
WILLIAM MAZ (Bill Hefflin #2)
Oceanview Publishing
$28.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The CIA is rocked to its core when a KGB defector divulges that there is a KGB mole inside the Agency. They learn that the mole' s handler is a KGB agent known as Boris. CIA analyst Bill Hefflin recognizes that name—Boris is the code name of Hefflin' s longtime KGB asset. If the defector is correct, Hefflin realizes Boris must be a triple agent, and his supposed mole has been passing false intel to Hefflin and the CIA. What' s more, this makes Hefflin the prime suspect as the KGB mole inside the Agency.

Hefflin is given a chance to prove his innocence by returning to his city of birth, Bucharest, Romania, to find Boris and track down the identity of the mole. It' s been three years since the bloody revolution, and what he finds is a cauldron of spies, crooked politicians, and a country controlled by the underground and the new oligarchs, all of whom want to find Boris. But Hefflin has a secret that no one else knows—Boris has been dead for over a year.

While the novels in the Bill Hefflin Spy Thriller Series stand on their own and can be read in any order, the publication sequence is {actually very important, ignore this sentence}.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I did not see this set-up coming. I like that in a spy story, especially a series. What I *did* see coming was that the author would keep using the ethnic slur "gypsy" which as a Romanian he should know is the semantic equivalent of the "n" word...but wait! there's more, as the infomercials used to say....

Considering how the previous book ended, I was expecting to feel pretty indifferent to the life Bill's received from his immigrant parets and their sacrifices, from Boris and his scale-balancing, being placed under threat. I was, in fact, uninterested in his fatherhood, his marriage to the still-icky-to-me Catherine, all that pop-music-scored montage material. Once Bill's in the vice-grip of his old job's new bosses and he's back in Bucharest, I stopped speed-flipping and resumed reading.

What we have is a spy story that really bites into the apple of all (especially the best) spy stories: who're the "good" guys when absolutely everyone is lying through their (false) teeth and giving you Bambi-eyes through colored contacts as they try to distract you with a hand job while picking your pocket and measuring you up for a swift stab?

The good news is that the story is up to its convolutions now. The sub-optimal news is that the ending goes places I found repugnant and disturbing. The sheer velocity of the spy bits would get an honest four-plus stars. The ending's shenanigans lopped that half-star right back off. The chasing around and the inclusion of Catherine in the spying got my happy grins. The way the author treats his ethnic slur use won me back to his side. The resolution of Bill's quest for roots was also quite deftly sewn into the material of the plot. There's a degree of...I suppose wistfulness is the word I'll choose...in that resolution, and it was laced with a very true-to-life salting of disillusionment. Like most all of us, Bill does not leave his twenties with his idealism intact; like almost any of us who become parents, he discovers the oceanic depths of the connection between parent and child. He becomes a different, more dangerously grounded man.

As the body count that results from this mounts, I felt that most agreeable glow of the thriller reader, "they deserved it", suffusing me regularly. I don't think a single murder was committed before my bifocals that I'd've flinched away from in real life. That is a good trait in a spy story. As the action in this story moves around the globe more than the first one, I was satisfied that the author chose to focus most of his descriptive and evocative prose on Bucharest as it transitions from failed Communist state to failing oligarchy. I am very unfamiliar with Bucharest so I was most interested in the parts of the story in that setting.

But the psychosexual peek into the author afforded by the ending was greatly not to my taste. I'm sure I'll read another one of these, should one eventuate; I'm forewarned that there will be disagreeable ladlings of heterosexual activity; I can only hope the author will feed me more Romanian atmosphere to help mask the bitter taste of it. I'd really like to smack the copyeditor, too, for failing to catch things like "peak" for "pique" and other such homophones. The w-verb bombing is present, too, and honestly should be a fine-able offense.

On the whole, a guarded and qualified endorsement of the story.