Spectacular Praise for
THECHARM
SCHOOL
HIGHEST MARKS GO TO THE CHARM SCHOOL, WHICH JUST MIGHT BE THE THRILLER OF THE YEAR. It is relentlessly suspenseful, generating excitement on every page and presenting an honest, unflinching portrait of the Soviet Union and its people. The Charm School makes the grade.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A HARROWING JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF TOTALITARIAN DARKNESS... a surreal mix of heartland illusion and heartless reality.... The result is a chilling, compelling, disquieting and ultimately devastating tale of police state savagery and superpower treachery.
Washington Post Book World
AN EXCITING, WELL-WRITTEN STORY WITH A LOT MORE ACTION THAN SPY-NOVEL FANS ARE ACCUSTOMED TO... a classic good guys-vs.-bad guys confrontation, a slam-bang ending.... This story gets high marks in suspense, action, and overall readability.
San Diego Tribune
A ROUSING ESPIONAGE ADVENTURE.
Dallas Morning News
SO RIVETING THAT HOLLYWOOD PRODUCERS WILL BE BRAWLING FOR THE MOVIE RIGHTS. No one will stop reading or even pause for the last 100 pages.
Boston Herald
THE CHARM SCHOOL GRABS HOLD OF YOU, DRAGS YOU OFF TO THE SCARIEST RUSSIA IMAGINABLE... and doesnt let you out until the last page.
James Kirkwood, author of Good Times/Bad Times and Some Kind of Hero
A FIRST-CLASS THRILLER... mixes the wham-bam action of the Firefox novels with Gorky Parks gritty insight into Soviet life.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A TOP-RATE THRILLER WITH A WHITE-KNUCKLE ENDING. A must read for anyone interested in the Soviet mind-set.
Dow Jones News/Retrieval
HIGHLY ENGAGING SUPER-SUSPENSE.
Kirkus Reviews
STUNNING... FASCINATING... DeMille has written a story that engages both the mind and the emotions, and done so with a style that makes it a pleasure to read.
West Coast Review of Books
AN ABSORBING NOVEL, ONE THAT NO READER WILL SOON FORGET. It looks deeply into East-West relations, and, in the end, what it teaches us about ourselves and Soviet citizens is disquieting and surprising.
DeLand Sun News (FL)
Books by Nelson DeMille
By the Rivers of Babylon
Cathedral
The Talbot Odyssey
Word of Honor
The Charm School
The Gold Coast
The Generals Daughter
Spencerville
Plum Island
The Lions Game
a cognizant original v5 release november 24 2010
With Thomas Block
Mayday
THE CHARM SCHOOL . Copyright 1988, 1999 by Nelson DeMille. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.
A Time Warner Company
The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2261-9
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1988 by Warner Books.
First eBook Edition: April 2001
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
To the memory of
Joanna Sindel
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my half-blooded and full-blooded Russian friends, Nicholas Ellison, Nanscy Neiman-Legette, Nicholai Popoff, and Svetlana, my spiritual guides through the labyrinth of the Russian soul. And thanks, too, to Bob Whiting, who taught me to swear in Russian. And special gratitude to Ginny Witte for her devotion to this work and this writer.
AUTHORS FOREWORD
On occasion, I find myself agreeing with the Washington Post. About The Charm School, they wrote, Contemporary Cold War fiction doesnt get much better than this.
But the Cold War is over, so is The Charm School still relevant? That would be like asking if any war novel or historical fiction is relevant. One of the first war novels ever written, The Iliad, is still read almost 3,000 years after it first appeared, yet some recent novels about the Vietnam War and the Cold War have passed into oblivion, while others are still read and enjoyed. Obviously the question of relevance is not the right question. The question is, What makes for a good, timeless read? The answer, as we all know, is good writing, believable plot, interesting characters, realistic dialogue, suspense, mystery, romance, the battle between good and evil, and sometimes even a happy ending.
We also know that war spawns hundreds of novels, most of them written after the last shot is fired. But the Cold War, for some reason, has not inspired any major retrospective novels since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Its as though whatever was written contemporaneously, such as The Charm School, or Le Carrs novels and Tom Clancys earlier books, or the thousands of other East versus West spy novels and nuclear Armageddon thrillers published between 1945 and 1989 are, and will be, the sum total of Cold War literature. The same can be said of motion pictures; with very few exceptions, Hollywood has not touched the subject in any significant way.
To be sure, tomes of nonfiction books, school texts, and film documentaries have been written and produced about the Cold War since it ended, but as an art form, the subject seems dead.
In any case, even if novelists dont want to write about the Cold War, and movie producers dont want to deal with the subject, what was written and filmed still has the ability to entertain and to educate.
The Charm School is set in the old Soviet Union. The time period is about 1988, and the premise, in a nutshell, is this: American Embassy personnel in Moscow learn of the existence of a Soviet spy school (the Charm School) that trains KGB agents to talk, act, look, and think like Americans. The reluctant instructors at the school are Americansmilitary pilots shot down and captured over North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. These pilots have all been listed as missing in action and their fate has been unknown for over a decade when the story opens.
