Love the way you guys run with this! So much fun! Any other clever little sequels out there? Love to hear them!
Congratulations Barb, on an amazing and powerful story! The characters and the setting are so convincing, it all comes to life in a compelling way. Indeed the reader is compelled to follow the heroine through every tumultuous stage of the action. The plot writhes in suspense whilst delightful background descriptions mingle with graphic violence. We get to know the dramatis personae whilst wondering if anybody is really who they appear to be.
The city of Berlin gets a character study of its own, evoking the pre-war atmosphere we recognise from 'Cabaret' - the excitement of the night life and the most sinister overtones of the fascist state. Barbara epitomises the victim of the no-win situation. The failure of her mission produces a new enemy just as hostile as the one she was sent out against, and her only friends turn out to be people we thought she shouldn't trust. It is a masterpiece of rage and suffering of which you should feel justly proud.
As the denouement comes thundering home, we learn how painful is the reality of experiencing defeat snatched from the jaws of victory when Barbara is abducted in her first moments of freedom. Reduced to the status of an embarrassment to her employers, we are presented with the stark evidence of her execution under circumstances as plausibly horrific as those she has previously endured. Barbara Moore is dead - Soviet era documentary evidence and photographs tell us that.
But can we trust such evidence from the state pioneers of fake photography and 'pravda'? Inviting the reader to indulge in conjecture, you present us with a choice. Call me a suspicious romantic, but I don't buy it. Maybe there is no such thing as a happy ending, or even any kind of ending. Barbara Moore may have had a lot of good luck and a lot of bad luck, but she also had a lot of guts. Berlin was an experience which left her with a lot of ghosts to exorcise, and even if it meant she had to be a different person, I believe that if it was humanly possible, she would have done anything to get back there...
