An energetic international drama with an indefatigable heroine.
A Cold War novel that features two accidental spies on a daring mission to change the Soviet government.
Set in Northern Europe in 1971, Baker’s epic international spy thriller chronicles the lives of Lena Kristoff, a Soviet academic economist, and Eric Barrenger, an American paleontology student in Sweden. Each ends up embroiled in the Cold War espionage that’s a perfect fit for the setting. Lena dreams of changing her government’s totalitarian system, while younger, more impressionable grad student Eric imagines the life of a spy to be lucrative and thrilling, so he accepts jobs to discreetly courier packages to remote locations. The characters’ paths converge in Leningrad, and they begin a steamy love affair, although the danger increases as the courier jobs become more complex. When a delivery goes wrong, Eric is shot and Lena barely escapes with her life, and as the couple are separated, Lena fears the worst. Before long, she’s surprised by an unexpected pregnancy, and raises Eric’s child with her sister, Katya, and her friends. In 1978, she takes a new secret assignment, assessing a computer model of the Soviet economic structure and smuggling documents for the CIA, which could make her aspirations for a Soviet “turnover to a Western-style economy and democracy” come true. Lena’s mission soon puts her on the run with her young son in tow, and in the novel’s gripping second half, she attempts to outsmart angry Soviet military colonels in a chase across Eastern Europe. Over the course of this book, Baker expertly sets scenes of betrayal, sabotage, and surveillance, all energized by Lena’s steely determination to bring down the Soviet government. The scenes between her and Eric effectively leaven the espionage excitement with passionate romance, but after a showdown at the Austrian border nearly kills Lena, it leads to characters reconsidering their lives. Baker once again shows himself to be a skillful, seasoned writer, as he adroitly demonstrated in his past historical biographies, detective series, and espionage novels.Throughout, he delivers captivating action as the gently simmering plot rolls along, with exacting, atmospheric period details, and crisp character development.
An energetic international drama with an indefatigable heroine.Pub Date: May 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-94-933622-1
Page Count: 511
Publisher: Other Voices Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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