The Red Fox - Anthony Hyde

'I had disappeared. The car had disappeared. For one night at least, I could enjoy the greatest freedom - or horror - conceivable in a totalitarian country: I had no official identity.'

You can tell The Red Fox is a product of the 1980s. It's very concerned with the Soviet Union. With its crumbling status, the forces struggling within it, whether its for power, for some racial theory, for nationalistic pride, whatever. That doesn't step to the forefront until the last quarter of the book, but it exists throughout.

Robert Thorne's a writer, formerly a journalist, called to Toronto by his one-time fiance, May Brightman. Her father's gone missing, and she thinks Thorne can use his contacts to help find him. Then the man turns up dead in Detroit, an apparent suicide. But by then, Thorne's already on the trail of something. May was adopted, but things about the adoption don't fit, people have been reading his mail, looking for something. The trail leads to Russia, and into the past, naturally. May's, and Thorne's.

The book gains momentum slowly. The first quarter of it was not exactly a page-turner. It's right around then that Mr. Brightman's body is found, and things pick up a bit. That might seem strange, considering he's dead, and apparently killed himself, but it forces everyone else to alter their plans. Leads have to be pursued more aggressively. One issue I had with the book, other than the slow start, was the seemingly large number of coincidences. Thorne seems to stumble into several situation where he just happens to be in the right place at the right time to see someone. He observes a hunting camp from an opposite hill for several days, then decides to try watching from his car on the road, and following them. And it's only after he starts in with that, he's led to another trail to pick up. I know those sorts of things aren't uncommon in these stories, but Hyde leaned on it too much.