World War II is behind them, but now an ominous Iron Curtain is descending in Europe. American Jake Burnes, Frenchman Pierre Servais, and their two wives travel to Turkey to help set a defense against Communist expansion in Istanbul Express, a novel by author T. Davis Bunn.

I've enjoyed the Rendezvous with Destiny series, especially the first novel, Rhineland Inheritance. It was a pleasure to see the four main characters teamed up in this conclusion, and I gained a new favorite, an older character by the name of Phyllis. She brings some refreshing moments to the story, including a fair share of its humor.

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 this last story, 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 the edition I read (Books 4 and 5 combined in a hardback) 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. ( )

As the Iron Curtain descends across battle-scarred Europe, American foreign policy races from crisis to crisis. With Stalin on the move, there's only one hope -- a strategy of containment to draw a defense against Communist expansion. At this moment in time, Jake and Sally are dispatched to Istanbul to oversee a massive aid program. Amidst murky Byzantine alleys, and magnificent domes and minarets, the couple is thrust into a hotbed of international intrigue the likes of which they'd never imagined. ( )