Across the Barbed Wire is a historical novel about an East German family attempting to escape to the West in 1964. But tragedy strikes, and Gisela awakens with her infant daughter in an American outpost, to find her husband gone. Her three-year-old son, Dieter has been snatched by border guards in front of American soldiers and returned to East Germany. From that moment she faces a monumental struggle to penetrate the Iron Curtain to find her son. This is also a story of soldiers and their families on both sides of the Iron Curtain. While it follows the fate of Gisela and Dieter, it tracks the lives of an American officer, John Parker, his wife, Gail, and others who become involved with them over the course of the Cold War, the Vietnam War and Desert Storm. Dieter is placed with an East German couple, and develops into an ardent communist who becomes an officer in the Volksarmee. Yet he is haunted with doubts about his past and what he has been told. After Parker returns from being mobilized for Desert Storm, he and Gail assist in Gisela's search for Dieter; but another tragedy in the form of a terrorist plot on a US Air Force base threatens to thwart the reunion of mother and son. Across the Barbed Wire is an incredible portrait of a mother's faith and a soldier's sense of closure as he looks back on the tumultuous events that impacted the lives of these characters. Pocock's familiarity with the military and with the places and actions described in the novel gives it an immediacy. It is quite simply, a page-turner. -Martha Bates, Michigan State University Press