The stakes here are high, with agents on both sides desperately following streams of sensitive information, but Matthews focuses on the people and the intelligence community’s day-to-day routines: exhausting surveillance routes a canary trap, a honey trap, a dead drop or just idle chat with potential recruits at embassy receptions.
#SPY VS SPY AGENT RED SERIES#
“Red Sparrow” may sound like some hodgepodge of the fantastic (seeing emotions?) and the prurient (“an Upper Volga Kama Sutra”) amid a series of spy vs. His aura is deep purple, “warm and honest and safe,” but he has his own designs on this comely young agent. like bat wings.”ĭominika is ultimately targeted against Nate, of course, as a means of discovering the identity of the mole within her own ranks. Several of her own comrades in the service, for example, are suffused with “the familiar yellow of treachery and betrayal.” One character’s evil manifests itself as “parabolas of black. Unbeknown to most, Dominika is gifted with a form of synesthesia that enables her to see emotions as colors - a condition that aids her immensely as she assesses the motives of both friend and foe. Conscripted into service by her uncle, Dominika excels at her training but then finds herself enrolled against her will in Sparrow School, a “Courtesan College,” where agents of both sexes are trained in the art of seducing the enemy. Although her parents secretly abhorred the Soviet system, she is the niece of the first deputy director of the foreign intelligence service - a mixed political heritage that puts her at the crossroads of the controversy about Russia’s new direction. Chief among those assets is MARBLE, the CIA’s “jewel in the tiara,” a mole at the top rungs of Russia’s foreign intelligence service who’s been selling out his country’s secrets for years.īut it’s the Red Sparrow herself, Dominika Egorova, who ultimately takes center stage. Increasingly reckless Nate Nash is one of the CIA’s internal-ops officers, tasked with recruiting and handling CIA assets. Much of that drama pivots on the relationships among three characters. Veteran CIA operative-turned-novelist Matthews keeps the trouble popping in “Red Sparrow,” but relentless drama is just one of the high points of this sublime and sophisticated debut. Just when one trouble is handled, another rears its fresh ugliness - perhaps wielding a two-foot-long Khyber blade. and the Russian governments, where bureaucracy and treachery frequently go hand in hand. High-placed moles have burrowed into the U.S. “ Likha beda nachalo,” reflects one of the Russian agents in Jason Matthews’s “Red Sparrow.” “Trouble is the beginning of disaster.”
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