After reading these last two books, I can say I've enjoyed the Rendezvous with Destiny series. It's both interesting and pretty heartbreaking to see the dire and precarious aftermath of a world war. Refugees. Hyperinflation. Poverty. The threat of the Nazis now past but Stalin and the Soviets looming like an ominous cloud.

It was a pleasure to get to know the four main characters through all five books and to eventually see them teamed up in the finale, here.

While I'd say the suspense and tension in this historical series is on the low-key side in general, I imagined the series might still go out with more of a bang, especially considering some of the high moments in the first four books and the intriguing setup at the end of Berlin Encounter.

However, in Istanbul Express, I found the tension and mood so low-key and the pace so sedate that my interest wandered a few times through it, and I never got deeply engrossed in it. More than past the halfway point, I was still waiting for things to pick up, and the ending doesn't bring the series to a satisfying close so much as the story just seems to choose a place to stop, having nowhere else to go.

I also wondered about the number of punctuation errors in this two-book edition and places where the recurring lack of conjunctions feels more awkward than stylish, as if the wording wasn't given a final polish.

But overall, I got what I was looking for when I decided to read some new-to-me books from the '90s by one of my longtime favorite authors. ( )