Even the minor characters in this and the preceding book are, on the whole, decent people (a family who smuggle refugees across the Black Sea, a random not!KGB dude who goes out of his way to do the right thing at a key moment even though it might cost him his career at the very least and his life at worst, etc). I think a lot of what made the action scenes in this book so tense was how desperately you want all the characters to make it out alive. I love the tropes of spy fiction - the moral shades of gray, the ethical and human difficulties of coping with undercover work, the action sequences - but a lot of it is too bleak and not humanistic enough for me. Petersburg that is an amazing sequence of endlessly piled-up complications and basically a demonstration of the writing principle of "take the worst thing that could happen to your character at this particular moment and then do that."īut what really makes both this and the previous book work for me is how likable the characters are. The action scenes are flat-out fantastic - this book features, among other things, an escape from a high-security Russian prison, a really fun (if OTT and logistically implausible) con on the not!KGB, and a car/snowmobile/air chase through a blizzard in and around St.
In addition to that, this book features the return of my two favorite supporting characters from the previous book, one of whom was presumed dead (but isn't), and a sympathetic Russian agent who was chasing them before and is reluctantly helping them this time around, admittedly after being blackmailed into it. As I noted in the other review, the part of the previous book I liked best was when the characters were cat-and-mousing around Russia, and this book is nearly all that. This is the sequel to the post-Cold-War spy thriller The Eighth Sister, which I reviewed here and enjoyed with caveats, but this book I flat-out loved.
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