Don't judge James Carroll's new novel, Secret Father, by its cover.

On it, an ominous barbed wire-topped concrete wall looms underneath a stormy sky, and the shadow of a man embracing a woman in a beret while another man looks on is cast upon it. It looks like the poster for a particularly odious Jerry Bruckheimer film or a sappy love-behind-the-iron-curtain romance for which Fabio was not available for a photo shoot.

A book as dignified, refined and politically and psychologically astute as Secret Father deserves a more nuanced cover than this.

The wall on the cover is presumably intended to be the Berlin Wall, and though it serves as a dominating specter in this book, it has not yet been erected during the time that most of the novel takes place. Paul Montgomery and his son Michael tell the story in alternating sections, reflecting on events that occurred the spring of 1961, a few months before the Berlin Wall was built, when Michael is a senior at a school for the children of American servicemen in Weisbaden, Germany.

Paul is a banker, but sends his son to this school so that he can have a more typically American high school experience, complete with cheerleaders and pep rallies. Paul's wife was killed in a car accident several years earlier, and Michael is one of the last American children to have been crippled by polio. These circumstances place a special burden on the relationship between this father and son.

Paul explains his take on the generation gap that arose between those who endured World War II and their children: "People of my generation, ahead of his, saw so little as it actually was then, as if the Manichean division of the world into East and West, bad and good, gave shape also to our most intimate relationships."

Michael asks to borrow the car to drive to school one day instead of catching the train as usual, and Paul hesitates, but then relents after Michael accuses him of being overprotective because of his disability. Michael, who up until then was honest with his father, has fallen under the thrall of his friend Ulrich, aka Rick, a charismatic, teenage socialist who hatches a scheme to head to Berlin for that weekend's May Day parade in the Soviet sector. Also along for the ride is Kit, a spirited, Faulkner-worshipping Southern girl with whom both of the boys are enamored.

Rick's adoptive father is an American general in charge of intelligence, and his mother, Charlotte, is a complicated German woman who bears great pain and secrets from her war-scourged past. Rick takes the general's bag with him on his adventure, and we soon find out that the bag contains an object that could jeopardize "national security" if it is discovered by guards in the Soviet sector of Berlin.

The kids pretend to the guards that they are a debating team on a school trip, but they quickly realize that they are in over their heads, and Michael imagines a question for them to debate: "Resolved: That World War Three will be started by some stupid kid lying to his father."

Once the parents realize the grave danger their children are in, given the ever-mounting tensions in Berlin, Charlotte and Paul rush to the city to try to locate and save them. What follows is a gripping spy thriller, two sensitive love stories, a rich and accurate historical tale, and several meditations on the nature of grief loss, and parent/child relationships, all packed into a moderately sized novel.

Carroll enfolds historical details into the personal stories of his characters with great and careful art. Many historical novels suffer from characters that think and act anachronistically, harboring ideas that are popular during the time when the book is written instead of the period in which it is set, or the characters seem too much like symbols for their times instead of real people.

Carroll never makes these mistakes. He has given readers a cast of characters that truly reflect their time while still coming alive as real, individual people. The teenagers act and think like idealistic, rebellious and naive '60s teenagers, and the adults think and act like people who have intimately known the horror of World War II and thus can never fully escape those memories. As Michael explains, "My father and I are alike in understanding history as the frame within which our quite personal story unfolds."

As if a gripping plot and intriguing characters weren't enough, Secret Father is also beautifully written. Carroll takes the time to detail what his characters see, think and feel, as in this description of an old church: "The pungent odors of stale incense, candle wax, dust, and perhaps the leavings of small animals all combined to evoke the airless musk of religion."

All of these qualities make Secret Father a splendid read, with a plot that could make an excellent movie - just don't tell Jerry Bruckheimer.

Jenny Shank's short stories have appeared in "CutBank" and "Michigan Quarterly Review," and one was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.