Stephan Talty

This history covers the early decades of American organized crime and tells the life story of an Italian-American detective who aimed to stop it. Joseph Petrosino was born in Italy, but immigrated with his family in his teens, and struggled like other immigrants to make something of himself in New York City. He eventually succeeded, joining the New York police force and specializing in the crimes of the Black Hand, the criminal organization that was the precursor of the Mafia. So many things about this history felt contemporary - the struggle of immigrants to make their way in a new country, the fear of crime associated with immigrant communities, the desire of some members of that community to prove themselves as Americans. An interesting history and one that deserves more thought and reflection.… (more)

In this book a female police detective in Buffalo, New York is the first on the scene of a grisly murder that becomes the start of an awful nightmare. She finds herself investigating multiple murders in a tight Irish immigrant community that seems too scared to talk to her, as much as it also is concerned about protecting its own people. The IRA is of course implicated in some form or another, and there is a bit of an unexpected twist at the end. Unexpected is a nice way of saying that the information one would need to guess about the surprise resolution is never provided until the last chapter or so, with so little foreshadowing as to make the ending too abrupt and not well integrated with the rest of the story.
I was not so impressed with the way the big baddie was not really even hinted at until the end of the book- it is pretty easy to be sure that your readers won't guess who is killing people if the killer is never mentioned as even existing until the very end when he suddenly is discovered to exist at the same time as he is identified as the killer. The rest of the story though, with killing off lead suspects in a process of elimination as the book progresses, worked well enough.… (more)

Agent Garbo tells the story of Juan Pujol, a Spaniard who during World War 2 became one of the German intelligence apparatus' most important agents. Which was an issue because he was in fact a double-agent, one of the many elements of the XX (Double Cross) system of deception and counter-intelligence used by the British intelligence services, and probably the most important element of that network.

I've read a number of books that cover similar ground (Kahn's Seizing the Enigma, MacIntyre's Agent Zigzag, Double Cross, and Operation Mincemeat), and so I had a pretty good understanding of the background, and wanted to learn more about Juan Pujol himself. Especially in comparison to MacIntyre's Double Cross, I feel like there was little new detail covered (other than Aracelli), and a lot of things that were redundant and less informative than in other areas. I second the comment about how the narrative gives us lots of discussion of the overall operational picture, but less about how Pujol actually crafted his network and distinguished its "members". Additionally, Talty doesn't discuss some of the intrigues and machinations of the Abwehr and how those affected their interpretations (MacIntyre argued that Roenne very possibly knew all the intelligence from the XX Committee was fake and pushed it forward because he was one of the many ardent anti-Nazis in the Abwehr and wanted to see the Germans lose the war).

It's well-written and a fast-paced story that does a good job of presenting the information available, but if you had to read one story about this caper, I'd tell you to just go ahead and read MacIntyre's XX Committee, which does a better job of presenting the work of the XX Committee and giving you more inforamtion about the agents themselves (including a few like Johnny Jebsen and Dusko Popov who only appear briefly here).… (more)