MOSCOW STING

Pseudonymous Brit journalist Dryden is back with another fine neo–Cold War spy thriller, the sequel to Red to Black (2009).

The first novel was a throwback, a le Carré–ish espionage yarn that pitted ruthless Russia against the West—but with the twist that this was not the Soviet regime but Putin’s resurgent authoritarianism. This book stylishly carries the story forward. It’s 2008. Former Russian agent Anna Bereft is bereft after the loss of her husband, Finn, to an assassin’s poison in the last book’s finale. She retires to a secluded Provençal village, where she lives under the French government’s rather lax protection. She’s being sought by the vengeful Russians, who want to punish her betrayal, and by the equally vengeful Brits, who want to kill the man responsible for the death of their ex-agent, Finn, and who can use her as an information source or a bargaining chip. When an American freelancer, a one-time rising star scapegoated and fired by the CIA, discovers her whereabouts and offers to divulge them to the highest bidder, Anna winds up under the protection (so-called) of American Burt Miller, head of one of the powerful private contractors to whom the United States is ceding control of intelligence-gathering and covert operations. The Americans try simultaneously to cultivate Anna and interrogate her, and the book’s most intriguing section is the long middle one in which we watch two cool and cunning pros, Anna and Burt (with the connivance of various employees), spar, feel each other out, try to manipulate and use each other to accomplish agendas only partially revealed. She is an ever-shifting combination of friend, ally, asset, instrument and hostile captive, and Burt’s job is to get her, more or less of her own volition and for her own reasons, to expose and bring over the highly placed Russian, Mikhail, who was her dead husband’s trusted source in the Kremlin and whose identity he believes she knows.

A twisty, persuasive, action-packed thriller, only slightly marred by a hurried ending.