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THE HELSINKI AFFAIR by Anna Pitoniak

THE HELSINKI AFFAIR

by Anna Pitoniak

Pub Date: Nov. 14th, 2023
ISBN: 9781668014745
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The sins of the father return to haunt his daughter in a long game of spycraft.

Amanda Cole is dying of boredom at the sleepy Rome bureau of the CIA when a tip comes in from a Russian bureaucrat on vacation—an American senator will be assassinated the next day in Egypt. The ripple effects of this event will change the lives of both Amanda and her father, Charlie Cole, also a CIA operative. Shortly after Amanda is promoted to Rome station chief, her father gives her a stack of papers found in the late Senator Vogel’s office. These papers contain notes that indicate the senator was working with a Russian oligarch to uncover a nefarious scheme involving “meme stocks” and day traders. For reasons Charlie does not understand (but can anxiously suspect), his name is written on the last page. Though part of him wishes to destroy the information, he delivers the papers to Amanda, setting in motion a complex plot that unfolds both in the present and decades earlier, during Charlie’s posting in Helsinki, which is where Amanda was born. By the time he left, his marriage was over and his career permanently derailed. As in her previous book, Our American Friend(2022), Pitoniak artfully deploys all the tricks and tropes of the spy genre, and she creates for Amanda a wonderful ally—a 73-year-old CIA superstar named Kath Frost who “had sniffed out more double agents than anyone in agency history” and who shows up in “a linen dress belted at the waist, a chunky turquoise necklace, a pair of red cowboy boots. Her gray hair hung long and loose over her shoulders.” The developing mentorship and friendship between Amanda and Kath as well as the unfolding of the Cole family’s unhappy past give the novel emotional weight and interest that add to its espionage plot.

These excellent female spy characters deserve a series.