Mischa Hiller (Sabra Zoo) has created another intense spy thriller with Shake Off, his second novel. Michel Khoury, in London, works as a courier, spy and strategist for his enigmatic boss, Abu Leila. Abu Leila and the Palestinian cause are all Michel has left. Haunted by the death of his family in a refugee camp, Michel drugs himself to sleep every night to avoid his nightmares. When he's awake, however, he is constantly aware--analyzing every gesture and word of the people around him as he works to fulfill his missions without detection.
Michel's life is a lonely one, with essentially no contact beyond that with Abu Leila, until he becomes better acquainted with the girl renting the room next door in his boarding house. Her name is Helen, and Michel finds her irresistible. As developments in the Middle East (and glasnost in the Soviet Union) complicate his professional life, Helen and her lover simultaneously complicate his personal life, increasing Michel's tension to almost unbearable levels.
Shake Off moves at breathtaking speed, flashing between Michel's life in Lebanese refugee camps, years of training in the Soviet Union and East Germany and his current life in London. With all these locations, Hiller has brilliantly re-created the late '80s setting, making the immediacy of the Soviet breakup and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict all too real. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm