The Knife-Edge Path - Patrick T. Leahy

Geli Straub, Berliner, ex Abwehr spy, sits out the war waiting for her husband Gunther who she has not heard from since the siege of Leningrad. A chance encounter with a ranked SS member who also happens to be her neighbor leads her to revisit her past as a spy past in order to find out more information about another SS officer named Kurt Langsdorff. Geli takes on the identity of a French woman and closes in on Kurt, but things are not all as they seem...

The Knife-Edge Path is part historical fiction, part spy novel; a story based in Germany towards the end of WW2, and later on in post-war France. It is the story of how evil pervaded through the Nazi occupation but also of how not everyone was who their appearance said they were. It is a well-written novel with well-formed human characters traveling along paths where the balance between evil and less evil is not as clear cut as it may seem. I did enjoy how each main character is developed into a complex being, and that there is no real reason why you want to root for any of them.

I did find some parts of the novel confusing, especially when the timeline jumps around without any real notice. Does the concentration camp scene take place in real time or in the past? When in the past?! And I also found some of the secondary characters a bit too caricatured, their images displaying as deformed in my imagination. There is also an element of the unbelievable in the plot, mainly in the love story aspect, as everything happens quite fast. I couldn’t take to Geli at all, I found her actions distasteful and weird at times (she seemed to be more interested in getting cigarettes from the fat SS officer, even if it meant flirting with him or further, than actually finding out information on her missing husband). There are areas that I wish the author hadn’t cloaked in darkness so much (the husband story for example, was he actually real?!). But these are all minor details, The Knife-Edge Path is interesting, compulsively readable, and could be a good start to a line of WW2 spy novels in the vein of Alan Furst.