?A damn good read.??Alan Furst A brilliant debut novel at once teasing literary thriller and a
darkly comic blend of history and invention The Torqued Man is set in wartime Berlin and
propelled by two very different but equally mesmerizing voices: a German spy handler and his
Irish secret agent neither of whom are quite what they seem. Berlin?September 1945. Two
manuscripts are found in rubble each one narrating conflicting versions of the life of an
Irish spy during the war. One of them is the journal of a German military intelligence officer
and an anti-Nazi cowed into silence named Adrian de Groot charting his relationship with his
agent friend and sometimes lover an Irishman named Frank Pike. In De Groot's narrative Pike
is a charismatic IRA fighter sprung from prison in Spain to assist with the planned German
invasion of Britain but who never gets the chance to consummate his deal with the devil.
Meanwhile the other manuscript gives a very different account of the Irishman's doings in the
Reich. Assuming the alter ego of the Celtic hero Finn McCool Pike appears here as the ultimate
Allied saboteur. His mission: an assassination campaign of high-ranking Nazi doctors
culminating in the killing of Hitler's personal physician. The two manuscripts spiral around
each other leaving only the reader to know the full truth of Pike and De Groot's relationship
their ultimate loyalties and their efforts to resist the fascist reality in which they are
caught.
