Double Cross Blind by Joel N. Ross

Double Cross Blind by Joel N. Ross. An entertaining tail of espionage on the brink of WWII. It reminds me of a line from Thomas Adcock's "Drown All The Dogs":

"It's spies and betrayals and secret codes and treacheries and propaganda and the very thickest of plots and all manner of deception and cruelty required to preserve man's civilization ..."

There are double agents and information that they do not use because if they acted on it, the enemy would know they have a leak, and the leak would be plugged, and then you would get no more information. How do you judge when the information you get is worth enough to justify sacrificing your source? Tough call any day of the week. And even if a particular piece of information is valuable, if you don't use it, you can protect your source so that some day they may provide an even more valuable piece of information. How do you evaluate that situation?

Then there were Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee. I have run into these characters in other stories, and they are recognizable and scary. One is big and doesn't say much. The other is smaller and has a sharp mouth, but they are both vicious killers and would as soon gut you as look at you. They are almost caricatures.

A much better book than Zigzag. I am not quite sure what it was that made it better. Fewer obvious flaws, perhaps? The hero did seem to suffer more than was reasonable, and seemed to perform better than he ought in fights, given his condition, but sometimes that's what makes the story.

I kept thinking about Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code", which had a number of similarities, but was a really terrible book. I hated it. It made a pretty good movie, but the book was just awful. Without going back and analyzing their writing, I can't say what makes "Double Blind Cross" so much better than "The DaVinci Code", but it most certainly is a much better story.