Proof that we don’t need the Cold War for smart spy fiction.
A retired CIA officer is pulled back into a dangerous game in this spy thriller by the author of Beirut Station (2023).
Alexander Matthews retired from the CIA and started Trinity Capital, a highly successful venture capital firm that often brings him to Russia. Once he’d been the CIA’s top spy in Moscow, but that’s all behind him now. But the Agency asks him for a favor: help extricate a Russian asset code-named Byron, a KGB-trained intelligence officer whom he had recruited and who claims to have sensitive secrets the CIA wants. He’d recruited other “poets” such as Keats and Blake, but they have vanished, perhaps in the bowels of Lefortvo Prison with bullets to the skull. Matthews has good reasons to decline: His late wife and daughter, killed in a boating accident while he was away, hated his lengthy absences, and he is on the verge of being estranged from his surviving son. He’s remarried to a CIA translator, and his travel stresses that marriage. So of course he goes to Moscow and is promptly arrested on a trumped-up solicitation charge. Then the FSB tells him he’s being investigated for tax fraud. Soon, he’s reminded that it’s dangerous for a wealthy American investor in Russia to be in the tabloids. And speaking of which, Byron claims to have the FSB’s kompromat on Topcat, who’d been in Moscow for the Miss Universe contest in 2013. One CIA official calls him Apocalypse 45, but like Voldemort, no one says his name. Readers will have to figure that out. Meanwhile, Langley believes it has a mole. Matthews feels an emotional tug to Russia’s capital city: He “wasn’t from Moscow, but he was of Moscow.” He’s going to have to get over that, as he’s not safe there anymore. Can he successfully exfiltrate Byron? As tension builds to a dramatic conclusion, so does the doubt. Vivid writing sets the tone: “The vans, yellow lights flashing, swallowed the prisoners like whales swallowing krill.” The plot delivers eye-opening twists as well as insights into the Russian psyche. “In Russia,” a character says, “stories never have happy endings.” This one fits right in.
Proof that we don’t need the Cold War for smart spy fiction.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781639368853
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.
More than a decade after a Georgia man is convicted of a monstrous double murder, an uncomfortably similar crime frees him and resets the search for the guilty party.
In Clifton County, home to the Rich Cliftons and the other Cliftons, the disappearance of teens Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker during the Halloween festivities hits everyone in North Falls hard. Working with her father, Sheriff Gerald Clifton, Deputy Emmy Lou Clifton hears the clock ticking down as she races frantically to get leads on the two friends, who’d been secretly plotting to take off for Atlanta after some undisclosed big score. As a longtime friend of Madison’s mother, Hannah, Emmy hopes against hope to find the missing teens before they’re both dead. By the time Emmy’s hopes are dashed, two unpleasantly likely suspects with strong attachments to underage sex partners have emerged, and one of them ends up in prison. In a bold move, Slaughter jumps over the next 12 years to the case of Paisley Walker, a 14-year-old whose disappearance catches the eye of retiring FBI criminal psychologist Jude Archer, who promptly crosses the country to come to Clifton County and take charge—um, that is, consult—on this heartrending new investigation. Emmy, suddenly and shockingly deprived of counsel from the parents who’ve supported her all her life, doesn’t get along any better with Jude than with the larger circle of Cliftons and the Clifton-Cliftons. But together they identify one new suspect, then another, before a shootout that arrives so early you just know there are still more surprises to come.
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780063336773
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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