There are so many parts of this that I love egregiously. The Cold War and colder magical war overlaid and interwoven is a fantastic concept, and it's delivered with spy-shenanigans much more of the Smiley than Bond school, which is always a lot more fun to read. I enjoyed the characters, with all their personal levers and problems. And in general, the writing was great.

My only real niggle was pacing again. The episodic nature of the original work is still not quite sitting right with me, and that's far more a problem with me than a problem with the material, which was designed to be read in a different way than this. I'm a little annoying with myself for not getting with it: after all, I don't expect the same pacing out of a binge-watched TV show as I do from a movie. But I'm just stuck on novel-pacing when it comes to the written word.

Anyway, broadly, I loved this. ( )

DNF. This just isn't the story for me. I need more witch/less Cold War spy and it gave me more Cold War spy/less witch. I also had a hard time connecting with any of the main characters.

[I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.]

The year is 1970, and the city is Prague, where CIA and KGB agents are maneuvering around each other, fighting the Cold War. But, unbeknownst to most of them, there is also another war going on, a war between two magical factions, and people who are on the same side in one of these conflicts may be on opposite sides in the other... as American intelligence agent Gabriel Pritchard finds out when he accidentally gets a supernatural entity half-stuck inside his mind.

This is an unusually constructed book, because it's modeled on the structure of a TV series. This volume is labeled "season one," and it consists of thirteen "episodes," written by five different authors. In principle, I think this is kind of a fun idea. Hey, modern television often has something very much like the structure of a novel, and why shouldn't the borrowing go in both directions? In practice, though, I don't think they've quite made it work. The result, at least for much of the book, feels disjointed, weirdly paced, and sometimes mildly confusing. (More than once, I found myself flipping back to see if I'd missed some important piece of exposition.) And I think that would be true even if you lifted the story from its pages and transferred it to the TV.

This does get better towards the end, at least. The last four or five "episodes" feel like a smoother, more coherent story, and feature a bit of decent suspense and an interesting twist or two. But that's not until something like 400 pages in, and, to be honest, by that time I was already feeling tired of the whole thing, so I was never quite as engaged with it as I should have been. Which is a pity, because I think the spies-and-sorcerers premise is really cool. Although it's never really developed as much as I'd have liked. We're basically given cliched one-line descriptions of what each of these magical factions wants (basically, destruction vs stability), but never get a good sense of exactly who these people are, why they want what they want, or how their world works. Which means that, ultimately, the plot feels like a fairly shallow McGuffin hunt: we want to get our hands on certain things (or, in this case, people) because if our enemies got them instead, that would be bad, because our enemies are bad people who want bad things, and never mind the details. Well, likely the writers are planning to delve a bit more into things if there's a "season 2," as well as picking up some of the ends that are left loose at the end of this one. But I think this was probably enough for me.

Rating: I'm going to be generous and rate this 3/5, giving it a half-star more than I might have, just because it does get a lot better as it goes along, and because the premise is fun. ( )

In 60s Prague, Soviet and American spies intrigue, but layered on top is the fight between the Ice and the Flame, competing groups of sorcerors trying to save and/or end the world, with tactics at least as underhanded as those of the Cold War spies. A Soviet spy/sorceress and an American spy are forced to work together on behalf of the Ice, after the American stumbles into something he really shouldn’t have and gets an elemental half-stuffed into him. Engaging enough. ( )