Enjoyed this great spy thriller that is so much more than just the spy drama. Jack Smith's professional life was just one aspect and it was woven expertly into the fabric of his person life and the world's stage he found himself on.

Jack Smith is a somewhat reluctant CIA agent under deep cover in soviet era Moscow in the mid 1980s. Preternaturally handsome, he is at heart a gay man, but as a spy he is whatever the company requires him to be - as an American working in Soviet Era Moscow he does whatever is required to project an image of banal heterosexuality. Jack is smart, savvy, suspicious as is required of him, while remaining empathetic and as the novel progresses, increasingly sympathetic towards the group of Russian nomenclature students he has befriended as part of his job.

Eton Volkonsky is a shy, lonely PHD student, deeply closeted due to the spurious social conditions of the time, and an avid writer. It is through his writing that most of his (beautiful) characterisation takes place. Eton is also a near genius, ambivalent nuclear physicist and passionate musician, the grandson of a Soviet nuclear physicist, ”royalty” whom, due to his mysterious family history is marked as an unwitting pawn of the CIA in Moscow.

The relationship between Jack and Eton is a tantalising slow burn of forbidden sexual tension, angst and mutual suspicion. Spanning almost a decade, three continents, and set against a back drop of real life events - from the spate of US ambassador ejections from Moscow, Chernobyl, the Soviet-Afghan war to the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is as thrilling as it is unpredictable and the last 20-30% of the book is a perfectly nail biting race to its conclusion.

At almost 300,000 words oood is an opus. Part epic love story, Cold War spy thriller, history lesson and cultural exchange, this book is a REALISTIC and meticulously researched spy thriller and one of the best books I’ve read all year.

The author has created interesting characters particularly the main three: Elon, Lara, and Jack, who is wonderfully portrayed as the conflicted spy. This personality, however, takes no prize when compared to the Russian duo, who bring a long history of Russian ethics, conflicts, and parallel desires to the story. As much as I enjoyed watching the characters progress through the novel, I was annoyed at the poor editing choices made, if indeed any were made. The book is simply too long. The narrative becomes tiresome even as the author adds more plots to keep it going. The sex scenes between Elon and Jack border on pornographic, but ultimately lose their charm. Elon's letters to his diary also suffer as they continue. His mother's diary might have added some interest, but it is only a bit player. Had the novel been 100 pages shorter, the story would have the benefit of a tighter narrative, and the suspense could still have been electric as we waited and read, hoping to find out how Jack resolves his dilemmas. But it is Elon who steals the very unsatisfying ending. After bearing with the author for so long, I felt as a reader that I had deserved a much better conclusion to the novel. Elon's ending behavior was not consistent with his pledges to Jack, and the sheer unbelievability of that song reaching Jack's ears in the huge and noisy crowd diminished the entire novel. Sorry, cowboy.
Thanks NetGalley, for the ARC.