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#BookReview Burning Cold (Cara Walden Mystery 2) by Lisa Lieberman

February 3, 2020February 1, 2020 whatcathyreadnext

About the Book

Budapest: 1956. Newlywed Cara Walden’s brother Zoltán has disappeared in the middle of the Hungarian revolution, harboring a deadly wartime secret. Will Cara or the Soviets find him first?

Cutting short her honeymoon in Paris to rescue a sibling she’s never met was not Cara’s idea, but her husband Jakub has a reckless streak, and she is too much in love to question his judgment. Together with her older brother Gray, they venture behind the Iron Curtain, seeking clues to Zoltán’s whereabouts among his circle of fellow dissidents, all victims of the recently overthrown Communist regime. One of them betrayed him, and Cara realizes that the investigation has put every person they’ve met at risk. Inadvertently, they’ve also unmasked a Russian spy, who is now tailing them in the hope that they will lead him to Zoltán.

Format: ebook (169 pages) Publisher: Passport Press
Publication date: 6th October 2019 Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery, Thriller

Find Burning Cold (Cara Walden Mystery #2) on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

My Review

According to the book description, the film version of Graham Greene’s The Third Man was the inspiration for this historical thriller. Set mainly in post-war Budapest, it certainly has the intrigue and noir feel of The Third Man but I struggled to find many other connections although I admit it’s many years since I watched the film or read the book. What this does mean is lack of familiarity with The Third Man needn’t mar your enjoyment of Burning Cold.

Burning Cold is the second book featuring Cara Walden and there are references to events in the first book. However, I’m pleased to say Burning Cold works perfectly well as a standalone read. In fact, it’s made me keen to read the first book in the series, All the Wrong Places.

I knew little about this period in Hungary’s history before reading the book. The events which unfold in Burning Cold rectified that omission without ever feeling like a history lesson because of the twists and turns of the plot. The atmosphere of paranoia amongst the population of a city with informers everywhere and who live in fear of the secret police is vividly conjured up. The author also creates an interesting dynamic between Cara, her husband Jakub and her brother, Gray.

Burning Cold is an enjoyable, well-crafted historical mystery that explores the legacy of conflict on families as well as nations. My thanks to the author for my copy of the book – and her patience in waiting for it to reach the top of my review pile!

In three words: Well-researched, assured, dramatic

Try something similar: The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer

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About the Author

Lisa Lieberman writes the Cara Walden series of historical mysteries based on old movies and featuring blacklisted Hollywood people on the lam in dangerous international locales.

Trained as a modern European cultural and intellectual historian, Lieberman abandoned a perfectly respectable academic career for the life of a vicarious adventurer through perilous times. She has written extensively on post-war Europe. Her most recent essay on the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution, “Stalin’s Boots” was the inspiration for Burning Cold, set in Budapest just as the Soviet tanks roll back in, evoking Carol Reed’s classic film of intrigue and betrayal, The Third Man, based on a treatment by Graham Greene. Keeping with the Graham Greene theme, her new Cara Walden mystery, The Glass Forest, takes place in Saigon in 1957, during the filming of The Quiet American.

Lieberman taught history for many years at Dickinson College and directed their Center in Bologna, Italy. She has held visiting fellowships at Ohio State and the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England and was the recipient of a Bourse Chateaubriand for research in Paris. In her spare time, Lieberman lectures on post-war efforts to come to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust in film and literature. On the lighter side, she gives talks on cruise ships.

She has published essays, translations, and short stories in Noir City, Gettysburg Review, Raritan, Michigan Quarterly, Mystery Scene and elsewhere and writes film criticism for 3 Quarks Daily. She is Vice President of the New England chapter of Sisters in Crime and a member of Mystery Writers of America. (Bio and photo credit: author website)

Connect with Lisa

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My Week in Books – 2nd February 2020

February 2, 2020February 1, 2020 whatcathyreadnext5 Comments

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday – I joined the blog tour for The Other You by J. S. Monroe.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was a freebie on the theme of Book Covers and I chose to focus on covers featuring flora and fauna.

Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is the opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next…and have a good nose around to see what other bloggers are reading.

Thursday – I shared my review of Sir Quixote of the Moorsby John Buchan.

Friday – I published my review of Katherine by Anya Seton.

Saturday – I took part in the monthly Six Degrees of Separation meme forging a chain from Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner to The American Agent by Jacqueline Winspear.

As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media this week.

New arrivals

How To Belong by Sarah Franklin (eARC, courtesy of Zaffre and NetGalley)

In the follow up to her acclaimed novel Shelter, Sarah Franklin returns to the Forest of Dean, this time exploring what it means to belong to a rural community in a rapidly changing world.

Jo grew up in the Forest of Dean, but she was always the one destined to leave for a bigger, brighter future. When her parents retire from their butcher’s shop, she returns to her beloved community to save the family legacy, hoping also to save herself. But things are more complex than the rose-tinted version of life which sustained Jo from afar.

Tessa is a farrier, shoeing horses two miles and half a generation away from Jo, further into the forest. Tessa’s experience of the community couldn’t be more different. Now she too has returned, in flight from a life she could have led, nursing a secret and a past filled with guilt and shame.

Compelled through circumstance to live together, these two women will be forced to confront their sense of identity, and reconsider the meaning of home.

The Sea Gate by Jane Johnson (eARC, courtesy of Head of Zeus and NetGalley)

After the death of her mother, Rebecca begins the sad task of sorting through her empty flat. Starting with the letters piling up on the doormat, she finds an envelope post-marked from Cornwall. In it is a letter that will change her life forever. A desperate plea from her mother’s elderly cousin, Olivia, to help save her beloved home.

Rebecca arrives at Chynalls to find the house crumbling into the ground and Olivia stuck in hospital with no hope of being discharged until her home is made habitable.

Though slightly daunted, Rebecca sets to work. But as she peels back the layers of paint, plaster and grime, she uncovers secrets buried for more than seventy years. Secrets from a time when Olivia was young, the Second World War was raging, and danger and romance lurked round every corner…

A Registry Of My Passage Upon The Earth by Daniel Mason (proof copy courtesy of Mantle Books)

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner, a collection of interlaced tales of men and women as they face the mysteries and magic of the world

On a fateful flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son.

At times funny and irreverent, always moving and deeply urgent, these stories – among them a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize winner – cap a fifteen-year project. From the Nile’s depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-racked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are tales of ecstasy, epiphany, and what the New York Times Magazine called the “struggle for survival…hand to hand, word to word,” by “one of the finest prose stylists in American fiction.”