Spy Games

Former CIA operative Jason Matthews sold the movie rights and a contract for a sequel to his debut novel, Red Sparrow, before it even hit the stands in 2013. The movie stars Jennifer Lawrence, who's gotten moderate-to-high praise for her work, and Lawrence Edgerton, who could not have been more miscast as Nate Nash. Matthews won an Edgar award for best first novel by an American in 2014. Palace of Treason was released in 2015 and the third book of the trilogy beat the movie to the punch by a few weeks, coming out in February 2018.

The "Sparrow" of the title is Dominika Egorova, a world-class ballerina whose career was cut short by an injury. Since her mother requires expensive medical care that the average Russian citizen can't pay for, Dominika goes to work for her uncle in Russian intelligence. He maneuvers her into the Sparrow School, where male and female operatives are trained to seduce targeted foreigners and provide blackmail material used to get them to provide information on their own countries. On assignment, she begins a recruitment of Nathaniel Nash, a young CIA officer. They realize their mutual attraction and Nate eventually convinces Dominika to serve Russia by betraying its corrupt leaders and spying for the United States.

By the time of The Kremlin's Candidate, Dominika and Nate's affair is a poorly-hidden secret to his superiors. But since she has begun rising in the Russian intelligence hierarchy, they do not stop the pair from occasional meetings. The problem now is that with the recent passing of the CIA director, a weak president is narrowing his list of choices for a successor, and one of them is a longtime Russian mole. Should that person get the job, Dominika would be immediately exposed and arrested.

Red Sparrow was a great debut novel, even mining Dominika and Nate's respective attempts to recruit each other for humor as neither of them were aware that the other was working on them for that purpose. Through it and Palace of Treason, Dominika began to rebuild the humanity crushed out of her at the Sparrow School and in the brutally sexist ranks of Russian intelligence services. Candidate is still good but a much weaker ending than it should have been. Matthews has produced some 1,400 pages of book, but he doesn't really have 1,400 pages of story, and Candidate is where that shows the clearest. There's a pointless sojourn in Macao and a horrendously complicated final act in a Vladimir Putin-owned villa when the jaws of the trap seem ready to close on Dominika and Nate. For whatever reason, Putin alone among real-world characters is not replaced with a stand-in and his weaving into Dominika's plotline seems lumpy and badly stitched together. The flow of the first two books is not present, with uninteresting retreads in the role of villains and coincidental plot elements that do not fit well together.

The "Red Sparrow" trilogy is a good one because Matthews writes well and knows his tradecraft from time in the field, and because in Dominika, Nate and some of their immediate circle he's created some great characters a reader wants to root for. But ending their story after Red Sparrow alone or trimming the three books into two would have strengthened it significantly.

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Kyra Stryker first joined the "Red Cell," the CIA's quirky think tank, in the 2012 novel of that name. She was a rookie agent hung out to dry for the mistakes of her superiors, but managed with the help of Red Cell curmudgeon Jonathan Burke to demonstrate considerable talent for the work. By the time of 2018's The Last Man in Tehran, Burke has retired and Stryker is the chief of the Cell. But she'll need her old colleague's help -- and no small amount of luck -- to prevent a deadly confrontation between Israel and Iran that's on high boil. Clues following a devastating attack on an Israeli port point to the Islamic Republic, but Kyra and others have heard whispers that things are not as they seem. A mole hunt by the FBI leaves far too many in the Agency unwilling to risk drawing attention to themselves by making decisions or taking risks. Will Kyra and Jonathan be able to head off a war that could leave the entire Middle East a wasteland? Can elements within the clandestine services of the two antagonists walk their nations back from the brink?

Henshaw is a former CIA analyst himself and has a good handle on the "office work" side of intelligence gathering -- after all, the purpose of gathering intelligence is to know what is going on so someone can do something about it. He also gives the bureaucratic side of things solid authenticity. Your office may have politics, but combine imagine what it would be with people whose very business is sneaking out secrets and hiding their own and who've been trained to do so. There's a little less fieldwork than the earlier Red Cell novels, at least by our principals. Still, Kyra travels to Iran to meet with a British asset who might be able to help her learn the source of the attack on Israel.

Henshaw has a handy hand with an action scene and doesn't take the easy routes with his different characters even if they walk some familiar ground. Rather than pulling stock character quirks off the shelf to differentiate them from each other, he takes the time to explore their backgrounds and give them some depth.