The Bucharest Legacy by William Maz
What's It About?
The CIA is rocked to its core when a KGB defector divulges that there is a KGB mole inside the Agency.The mixology for the best spy thrillers requires a bartender-author who knows how to stir (or shake) nuance, characters and place.
“Nuance” means you’re put in a world dripping with darkening shades of gray until the classic notions of right and wrong twist like licorice. Heroes are conflicted, multi-dimensional humans, not comic-book action heroes. Places are exotic, especially during those dark, gray times.
If that’s the fiction you savor, you’ll want to order a double shot of William Maz’s “The Bucharest Legacy.” This well-crafted tale brings the dramatic, slow burn of a John le Carré novel and plenty of spy games to the troubled nation of Romania in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union when a brutal, corrupt form of capitalism and faux democracy emerged.
Our hero is semi-retired CIA analyst Bill Hefflin, who must navigate the labyrinths of his native land, not to mention deadly games played by his own agency. “The Bucharest Legacy” is the second book about Hefflin in a series Maz started with “The Bucharest Dossier,” but it stands on its own.
The Agency yanks Hefflin from his comfortable life to rejoin the fray. They need his wealth of knowledge about the country to help a defector get into American hands. He’s told his mission to extract the defector from Bucharest should be a no-brainer. Hah. After an extended chase that breaks bad beyond anyone’s predictions, the defector eventually gets to America. There he rocks the CIA with the revelation that there’s a high-level mole in the agency working for the Russians.
EXOTIC AND WELL-DEVELOPED SETTINGS
For years, Hefflin was the handler for an important asset known only as Boris, a master of disguise who seemingly knew all the angles in Eastern Europe. Which side was Boris on, or was he on all sides; a triple agent? Meanwhile, Hefflin emerges as the most logical candidate to be the mole. After all, no one knows Romania better than he does, and he left the agency into a life of fabulous wealth that he attributes to his wife, who happens to be his childhood sweetheart with all kinds of mysterious connections herself.
Hefflin is told he can help prove his innocence by returning to his city of birth, Bucharest, to find Boris and the mole. But he’s not the only one seeking Boris. The Romania of 1993 is a viper pit of spies, corrupt politicos and oligarchs with competing agendas and resources to carry out their wishes. Hefflin, meanwhile, holds tight to a secret: He owed much to Boris, and his friend is dead.
One of the best things about “Legacy” is Maz’s great sense of place. You feel as though you’re with Hefflin in Athens, Bucharest, Istanbul and Paris. Maz puts you in basements overflowing with secret police records, the palaces of wealthy oligarchs, small clock shops (trust me, they’re important) and the poorest gypsy neighborhoods.
Maz was born in Bucharest of Greek parents and emigrated to the United States as a child. He’s also a graduate of Harvard University and Mount Sinai School of Medicine who did a residency at Yale but developed a passion for fiction writing that he now pursues full time.
Underneath the exotic and well-developed settings, you sense the author’s deep affection and concern for the ultimate fate of the Romanian people. The time period matters a lot to the story, and for those of us living in the weirdness of 2023, it’s a sad, cautionary tale. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communist Eastern Europe and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a brief, naive period of hope that true democracy would take root. But the totalitarian Russia we recognize today already is emerging.
As characters in Hefflin’s story note, secret police are the same even when the labels change, and capitalism doesn’t need democracy to flourish – at least for the oligarchs.
About the author:
WILLIAM MAZ was born in Bucharest, Romania, of Greek parents and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. He is a graduate of Harvard University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Yale residency. During his high school and undergraduate years, he developed a passion for writing fiction. He studied writing at Harvard, the New School, The Writer’s Studio in New York City, and with Gordon Lish, and is now writing full time. He divides his time between homes in Pennsylvania and New York City. The Bucharest Dossier is his debut novel.
