The Charm School by Nelson DeMille

The Charm School by Nelson DeMille was an extremely long, detailed look into a fictional scenario in which the Russian KGB had a secret spy school for the past two decades. Despite the length of the book, over 700 pages in the paperback, I found the book to be engrossing from the beginning to the end. A flaw in many long books is the overwhelming number of characters, but DeMille doesn’t compound the complexity of this novel with too many characters. Instead he gives depth to a limited number of elite people in the story, including some crazed “bad guys” that Mr. DeMille brings to life so well in many of his books.

Despite my little knowledge about Russia and its politics, this international spy novel leads the reader through the complex relationship that defined the Cold War between the United States and Russia. While the story immediately launches into an intriguing progression of events, the novel is much slower in the first half of the 700 pages, but the depth of characters and original plot kept me interested till the end.