![]() ![]() ![]() Matthews’ characters are variously fascinating, eccentric, and truly odious, including a beautiful Russian woman with the gift of synesthesia, forced into “sparrow school” to learn espionage through seduction a brilliant and flamboyantly odd head of CIA counterintelligence a “poisonous” dwarf whose reveries always return to torture and murder during Russia’s Afghanistan debacle and many more. That sense of authenticity, along with vividly drawn characters, much detail about tradecraft, and an appropriately convoluted plot that centers on moles in both the SVR and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence make this a compelling and propulsive tale of spy-versus-spy. ![]() Add to that list Jason Matthews, whose 33 years as a CIA field operative enriches his first novel with startling verisimilitude, from griping about meddling, deskbound bureaucrats at Langley to the flat statement that Russia’s SVR, successor to the KGB, sees the Cold War as alive and well, and that in Putin’s Russia, “nothing has changed since Stalin.” Perhaps this is novelistic license, but it feels genuine. Many spy novelists, including Ian Fleming and John le Carré, actually worked as intelligence agents. ![]()
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