Vital lies A thriller

In Pyne's outstanding sequel to 2021's Water Memory, 50-year-old Aubrey Sentro, a former CIA agent, joins the hunt for Günter Witt, a former Stasi agent who has resurfaced. In 1989, Sentro, then 18, was posted to Berlin, where she was tasked with infiltrating the East German secret service. After blowing her cover to protect other American agents, she was arrested, taken to jail, drugged, and tortured. Witt was her chief tormentor. She subsequently lost much of her memory of her 11 months as a captive. Meanwhile, in the present, ex-Basque separatist Xavi Beya and his wife and children are captured by two terrorists, Yusupov, a Chechen, and Mercedes Izquierdo, a Cuban. To protect his family, Beya is forced to commit terrorist acts. Yusupov and Izquierdo's subsequent attack on Sentro's home in the New Mexico desert, in which Sentro's hired hand and lover is killed, causes her daughter, Jenny Troon, to become involved in Sentro's return to the spy world. Sentro has serious skills, but her fragile mental state leaves her always on the edge of disaster. Pyne keeps the pages racing by. This gripping cinematic thriller will leave readers transfixed. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Assoc. (Feb.)

In Cold War Germany in the 1980s, teenager Aubrey Sentro is an entry-level intelligence operative for the CIA. When she discovers that an entire CIA unit's cover is about to be blown, she sacrifices herself to give them time to escape. She is captured and handed over to former Stasi agent Günter Witt, who beats, rapes, and impregnates her. Often drugged, she is told by her captors that the baby was stillborn. Then the Berlin Wall falls, and the Cold War is over. Sentro returns home to her family but with memory loss and ongoing PTSD. Thirty years later, Witt reappears in connection with a series of bombings in Europe. Meanwhile, a woman claiming to be Aubrey's daughter also surfaces with deadly intent. When Aubrey and her daughter are drawn into the search for answers and put in peril, Aubrey must recover the long-buried truth about her past. This is Pyne's second book (after Water Memory) in the "Sentro" series. Narrator Christina Traister skillfully presents the many voices and accents necessary to make the story come alive. VERDICT Listeners of spy thrillers will enjoy this book. Recommended.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

Security solutions specialist Aubrey Sentro's latest attempt to retire from "Moonlighting in the Spook Life" plunges her as deeply into international intrigue as all the others. Sentro's old Soviet contact, exiled oligarch Ilya Arshavin, wants her to look into a recent terrorist bombing at the Madrid stock exchange that destroyed $500 million. He doesn't think the perp was a terrorist, and his fatal shooting soon afterward by the bomber gives his request a certain urgency. Even though her children, Jenny and Jeremy Troon, still recovering from the scars inflicted by her last adventure, beg her to let it go, Sentro, driven by a combination of institutional loyalty and OCD, reluctantly agrees to one more spin of the wheel even though she's still tormented by nightmares and daytime bouts of amnesia. Her official mission is to lead Canadian Security Intelligence Service special operative Ryan Banks and other interested parties to Pogo, the former Stasi spymaster whose identity she'd learned during her yearlong imprisonment in the Soviet Union back in 1990 and then forgotten. Before she can take more than a few halting steps in that direction, a hit team swoops down on her ranch and kills her current lover, and soon after an awkward conversation in which Sentro shares with Jenny, whom she's rescued from the ranch in the nick of time, some unlovely secrets of her past, her daughter abandons her to fly to Europe with the glamorous Cuban-born assassin Mercedes Izquierdo. As Sentro gets closer and closer to unmasking Pogo, she realizes that her daughter is following surprisingly closely in her own footsteps in good ways and bad--and that Sentro herself has been living even more lies than she's known. A sadly effective dramatization of the comic-strip Pogo's insight: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.