What a fun read! I felt like I was watching a classic movie from the golden age of cinema telling a lost story of World War I. The author is excellent at setting the stage and allowing his characters to inhabit it fully. It moved along briskly and never let me take my time. I liked the adventure and the period details very much. I also enjoyed the characters and their ability to hide their deeper selves from the other characters and the reader. Exposing tiny pieces in glimpses and never making i...

A spy story that involves romance and derring-do on the ill-fated Lusitania in 1915, a trip on the Orient Express, and a dangerous quest to foil the German schemes with the Turks in Constantinople would seem to have the necessary ingredients for a fascinating and entertaining read. And given that the author won a Pulitzer Prize for a short story collection in 1993, one might hope for some literary heft behind the tale. However, for me the tale came out as average in the thrills department and th...

I'm really liking this series. It's like the opposite of Alan Furst. Everything is explicit, fast to develop, American, omniscient first-person narrator. World War I has begun and Kit Cobb is on the Lusitania. I think we can figure out which trip. Somehow he ends up in Constantinople, thanks to falling in love with a "Greek" actress while aboard. He is now in the full employ of the US Government, and yet still a war correspondent. He is also now a more confident and competent killer, for better

I wanted him to stop talking. The pistol and I were getting to know each other. I turned away from him and lifted the Mauser and settled the front of its barrel in the rear V-sight, with the head of a rose in the wallpaper as the target. All through last year’s little adventure in Mexico, I’d carried a Colt 1911. A fine but large weapon that was now at the bottom of the North Atlantic, a loss that only just now fully struck me. Too bad. But this covert, diminutive Mauser, with a .32-caliber kick...

Butler is given to excess, he over uses cultural objects as stand-ins for time, place, and atmosphere, and Cobb as tough guy can be too much - but man is the book fun. It reads like the kind of hard-boiled film noire that was derigueur 50 years ago and it kept me willing to ignore the worst of it because the best is so worthwhile. It is, IMHO better than the first Cobb book, and will have me reading the second.

The Star of Istanbul is Christopher “Kit” Marlowe Cobb’s second adventure from Pulitzer Prize winning author, Robert Olen Butler. We were first introduced to Kit in The Hot Country and we will surely see him again as part of a trilogy of thrillers.Foreign correspondent “Kit” Cobb has been tasked with following a German intellectual aboard the Lusitania in the middle of WWI. He meets sultry actress Selene Bourgani on board, who appears to be working with the German Intelligence and he becomes int...

The second go-around with Christopher Marlowe Cobb is tauter than the first - there is only one action scene relayed in a breathless run-on-sentence that I can remember, and there are a number of quite dramatic changes of setting as opposed to an endless series of Mexican deserts - but "The Star of Istanbul" still doesn't quite rise to the level of a 4-star read. First and foremost, there is far too little of Istanbul in a book called "The Star of Istanbul," and what little there is fails to inv...

I received The Star of Istanbul as a free giveaway on Goodreads. An excellent book of political intrigue and spies during WWI, filled with long-forgotten history, it was a hard book to put down. A captivating story line, with riveting characters, and enough twists and turns to captivate the reader. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of a good action-packed thriller along the lines of Ludlum and Higgins.

Interesting, this appears to be a genre of thriller I hadn't previously encountered, the soft-boiled semi-noir. Cobb seems to wander through the usual mayhem, pile-up of bodies and the tough dame with a shrug, like it was all too hard or something. And for what? I'm still not sure.But there were some seriously good bits and some interesting and engaging tension along the way. Mind you, I'd like to see this as a movie, I think that could really work.

Pretty good. This is the strongest of the four of Robert Olen Butler's Cobb spy pieces that I have read. It's not exactly a thriller, but an interesting combination of that and literary fiction. The body count is a little high--and Cobb probably too good a shot for the real world, a flaw with another character in the first novel. The plot takes us via the Lusitania's last voyage (of course) via London and Germany to Istanbul, where the action plays out.What's most interesting is that along the w...

A while back, I decided (again) that life is just too damn short to read easy, pop books, and that I would dedicate my reading and living only to challenge. Then, after reading Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (Challenging and I loved it), I gave my brain a rest and read Olen's The Star of Istanbul. One of those spy/mystery novels that just so happen to take place at an auspicious moment in history, this time the sinking of the Lusitania and the imminence of WW I. Olen seems to me to be a frustrated man

I liked this book a lot. A great adventure and a great love story. Kit Cobb is more of a spy this time than a newspaperman, working for the US at the beginning of WWI sent on a mission to Istanbul and sailing on the Lusitania, another one of the great unsinkable ocean liners. Uh oh.The character of Kit Cobb does a lot of the things that James Bond does (well, will do given the time period) but I found him much more likable. Ian Fleming was a great writer but his class snobbism shows through in h...

This is the second of the Cobb books in the series, and the second I have read. It is also the last one I will read. The story took forever to tell, filled with lots of pretty irrelevant stuff that kept the story from making significant progress. Intrepid Chicago war-correspondent Kit Cobb, fresh from his exploits in Mexico, has been called upon by the US Government to act as a spy against the Germans in Europe, before the US has entered WWI. He sails to Europe on the Lusitania (is that forebodi...

The Star of Istanbul – A Stylish Spy Thriller Pulitzer Prize Winning author Robert Olen Butler has written a second Christopher Marlow Cobb Thriller and The Star of Istanbul picks up a little further on from The Hot Country. Cobb has added another string to his bow he is now not just a famous war correspondent but a US State Department Spy that can use his reporting as cover especially now that it is 1915 and Europe is at war.Butler has written a clear and crisp spy thriller with excellent histo...

Having read Butler's first historical thriller, Hot Country, I decided to give this one a go. In fact, The Star of Istanbul is in my view even better. The action is never-ending, so it's a page turner. What I however appreciated very much is the fact that Butler has done his research on the era (this one takes place in 1915 during WWI) and the book is filled with excellent descriptions of the places (London, Istanbul), history, politics, technology... He captures the period atmosphere very well....

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Star of Istanbul': Continuing the Saga of Kit Cobb: Foreign Correspondent, Secret Agent Man A year has passed in the eventful life of Christopher Marlowe "Kit" Cobb, foreign correspondent and spy and a marvelous creation of author Robert Olen Butler.We last saw Kit Cobb in Mexico in 1914, keeping his eye on German spies in Butler's debut Kit Cobb thriller, "The Hot Country" (for my Oct. 1, 2012 review: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/45469) "The Hot Country" has just been publis...

This series is becoming my latest guilty pleasure. The main character, war correspondent-turned-spy Kit Cobb, is too much of a macho throwback and one of the big “surprises” was too predictable for my taste. But still, it’s a ripping yarn featuring a secretive film star, German spies and a plot to assassinate the Turkish head of state. The mystery is enriched by the real sweep of history as WWI takes hold, from U-boats in the Atlantic to massacres in Armenia, and an excellent description of the

In his second historical espionage novel featuring Christopher Marlowe Cobb, Robert Olen Butler has enlisted the war correspondent as a secret agent for the United States Secret Service. World War I is raging in Europe and the Middle East, and Cobb has been assigned to trail a German-American academic named Walter Brauer. Brauer is a professor of what were then called "Oriental studies" in London. (Today in the US we call them Middle Eastern studies.) But he is known to American authorities as a...

I thought about ditching out on this book early on and am wondering why I persevered! If you're a spy/espionage aficionado, I think you might like this. Takes place during WWI and starts off on the Lusitania, including our main characters escaping from its sinking. Very dramatic, lots of sex, fighting, murders and international intrigue. The narrators approach added to the drama - maybe a little too much for my taste. This is my second historical espionage, the first being Mission to Paris and I...

Abandoned this book after making very little progress. I was so looking forward to it when it arrived but what i read didn't match my expectations and was tangled and confusing. Such a shame as it could have been brilliant but i don't want to spend more time trying to read it when i have a growing pile of books to read.