Top drawer espionage/revenge story combining fact and fiction for a rivetingly realistic thriller.

The espionage thriller, Sun Tzu’s Café by Dr. Eric Bornstein, is an absolutely riveting read, combining fact and fiction, historical and current events, historical figures and engaging fictional characters. It is a tale of insidious revenge, eked out over many decades until some of the main players practically become institutional memories. I was glued to this story!

Li Qiang is a good son; he loves and honors his parents and accepts his father’s generational desire for revenge against the country of his birth (the U.S.), passed down from HIS father, without question. He’s smart and excels at school, and just when he left college to begin his own life, he was snatched up by the U.S. government to be used in secret, unethical research. The story of his twenty-five years at the mercy of the government is incredibly tragic and heart-wrenching. Even knowing his goal was to destroy the U.S., I still rooted for him to escape his life of servitude in the name of false patriotism. I was conflicted about how I felt about this character until the end.

Similarly, I ached for the position young Dr. Guilford Champlain finds himself in. Deliberately and ironically, Qiang manipulates the young Ph.D. student into the same program he himself abhors. Both had little choice but to comply and were trapped, weighed down by the same disgust of what the government was doing.

Throughout the story, the author cites sources for names, events, science, and technology, establishing which specific elements are factual rather than fiction. Some of the issues involved, such as the prohibition of the TikTok app on government devices, are amazingly timely. I wondered, as I read, how much I assumed was fictional I was wrong about; it was plausible and so realistic.

The tension builds slowly at first but gradually and increases until it’s almost in full panic mode by the eleventh-hour climax. At this point, the author alters his chapter lengths to almost paragraph size, switching between the points of view of those involved in the unfolding excitement, each ending with a cliffhanger as the perspective changes. The action was breathtaking and edge-of-your-seat stuff, and no one will put this book down when they get to this point of the story.

I enjoyed the interesting mix of historical figures with fictional characters and the saga-like span of time the book covers. The story is well-paced, even with its inclusion of the scientific and technical descriptions of the processes under investigation and the history of the different eras. The footnotes could keep readers busy going down rabbit holes for weeks after reading the story.

With its highly sympathetic characters, clever, long-haul plot, and historical settings, I recommend SUN TZU’S CAFÉ to readers of espionage tales, revenge stories, family sagas, and political thrillers.

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advanced Review Copy through RABT Book Tours and PR. ( )