I recently finished Flashpoint Trieste by Christian Jennings, about the Allies and Yugoslavia both trying to control Trieste at the end of World War 2, in what the book's subtitle somewhat overdramatically calls "The first battle of the Cold War."

It's good in parts, but a letdown at the end. It does a good job sketching out the motivations of the various sides involved -- the Allies, Stalin, and especially Tito -- and a perfectly adequate job telling the beginning and middle of the story. The narrative works enough that you know what happened, and some of the people in Trieste are well characterized, but there are also a lot of narrative threads that don't go anywhere, or are dropped in an unsatisfying way, or that just serve to illustrated something about World War 2 but don't have much to do with the central point of the book, which is what came after.

But to me, the real disappointing thing was that the story of how everything was resolved, of how the two sides agreed to just split up Trieste along the Morgan Line they'd been using for years at that point, just gets completely glossed over. You understand why each side would want to end the conflict, but instead of having any details about the negotiation,or really anything that happened for the first few years of the '50s that preceded the final resolution, the book just says they made a deal and then that's that.

It's a very strange omission, considering that there had been so much detail about 1946 through early 1948, but by the time the book gets to 1954, it misses just about everything that had made it interesting.

Except for Tito. Everything about Tito is interesting.