THE CORMORANT HUNT

Despite embarrassing the CIA by exposing a high-ranking agent’s efforts to rig the 1996 Russian elections and murder people to keep the operation a secret, field agent Ari Falk is drafted for a sensitive undercover job in this standalone sequel to The Collaborators (2024).

Why would his boss, Asha Tamaskar, the CIA’s edgy new deputy director of covert operations, turn to him to infiltrate a radical European group bent on doing grave damage to Western interests? Who better to play double agent than an operative the Company “burn[ed]…before the entire world” and for whose actions the U.S. had planned to apologize to Russia before that country’s invasion of Ukraine “rendered this and every other issue moot.” Since being outed for having passed the incriminating dossier to a WikiLeaks-type publisher—an action for which some people consider him a hero—Falk has been hiding out in the Republic of Georgia. Now back on the beat, learning how to be a double agent as he goes, he pursues the intel needed to thwart the radical group’s coldly self-regarding front man, Felix Burnham, a onetime CIA agent and American citizen born in Russia. Falk’s increasingly dangerous mission takes him across Europe, out in the open, from Tbilisi to Prague to London, through checkpoints and in the crosshairs of an elusive enforcer known as Cormorant. A ghostlike presence, Cormorant has been killing people for decades. His most recent victim: the publisher of the dossier. While James Bond, Jack Ryan, and Jason Bourne are invoked here and there’s plenty of action and intrigue, the true nature of espionage is revealed as far less glamorous: “Spycraft was a field of empty traps, rusting open.” Idov offers real insight into the self-protective games his characters play. The cagey CIA asset Katya Lisichenko “carried herself like a bearer of secrets, careful not to trip and spill. Tamaskar had seen this type of apprehension in assets before. It usually meant the real deal. It was always the ones with nothing to tell who wouldn’t stop talking.”

Spy fiction at its headiest and most addictive.