Ellen's comments:
To whoever put Moscow Sting on display on the end of a book stack, thank you.
Alex Dryden’s work is reminiscent of John le Carre but moves into the Putin era. Red to Black recounts the story of Finn, an MI6 operative, and Anna, a KGB colonel and member of an elite espionage family. Finn has a contact at the highest level of Putin’s organization feeding information to him, and Anna is assigned to get close to Finn and find out who the mole is.
I’m glad I read the second book first, for Red to Black is slow-moving until near the end as Finn traces financial manipulations begun during the Cold War and designed to control Europe’s economy and shift world power. Through the account, however, runs a jaw-dropping history of Russian politics, greed and corruption.
Toward the end, it becomes a true “spy thriller” as Finn and Anna, now deeply in love and completely committed to each other, gather the final bits of information needed to prove Finn’s theory and then escape to a remote haven in the West.
Moscow Sting opens as three nations, all desperate to learn the identity of Finn’s mole, “Mikhail,” search for Anna and she become embroiled n new dangers to herself, her son, and Mikhail. Since le Carre’s Cold War chronicles, technology has advanced fantastically, transportation accelerated, and espionage is become privatized. This part of the story is a nail-biter and who-can-you-trust page-turner that ranges from the Kremlin to the American Southwest and venues in between. I’m anxiously awaiting more from Dryden.
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