Red Star Burning

April 23, 2012
Freemantle’s dry satirical wit, aimed directly at the pomposity of intelligence bureaucrats and politicians, lifts his 16th thriller featuring spy Charlie Muffin (after 2010’s Red Star Rising). Muffin goes undercover in Russia to extract his own wife—their marriage has been a secret up until now—and return with her to London. His wife, Natalia, a colonel in Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB, has long wanted to defect, and her knowledge of her country’s secret affairs would be a huge intelligence coup for Charlie’s employer, MI5. Meanwhile, Charlie’s bosses, led by the unctuous Gerald Monsford, have their own extraction operation going on, and the unwitting Charlie is merely bait to distract the Russians’ attention. Though the plot suffers from a surfeit of talking and a paucity of action, Muffin’s a smooth operator, who with any luck will take on a more exciting challenge in his next outing.

July 1, 2012
A talky thriller of rogues repeating half-truths in the hopes of manufacturing reality; a terrific story starring Freemantle's Charlie Muffin. Freemantle's Muffin man returns for the 17th time, and the story seems to take up where his Red Star Rising (2010, etc.) left off. Charlie Muffin is in a safe house, out of the game, aching to return. Turns out Muffin has a wife and child in Russia. His wife, a Federal Security Service agent, charged with debriefing him after his faked defection, fell for him instead. After persuading his MI5 handlers that his wife and child are worth saving, Muffin makes himself indispensable to the team tasked with saving them. But there is no shortage of enemies, as many at home in England as in Russia. At least a double cross is on, if not a triple, and there's genuine suspense in the unfolding origami. The book's principal pleasure is the survey of mendacity in all its forms, from the self-serving, Shakespeare-spouting director of one of several intelligence services with skin in the game, to Cabinet Secretary Sir Archibald Bland. Even if the action is typical of the genre, the characters' motives have an atypical excess of plausibility: These folks operate and backbite in a believable milieu of toxic office politics. If only Freemantle had the same confidence in his readers. The majority of the book is dialogue, and almost every speech appears in the equivalent of a color-coded thought bubble: Smith "echoed"; Bland "refused"; Palmer "stumbled." This is a source of frustration for those of us who, completely engaged, want to intuit the tone of speeches that might be arch, but just might be heartfelt, the speaker actually believing what turns out to be utterly false a few pages later. But to his fans, this is no more than a quibble: Muffin is back, and his followers will herald his return.

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June 15, 2012

In Freemantle's latest Cold War thriller, British MI5 field agent Charlie Muffin's (Red Star Rising) hidden life is finally exposed. Secretly married to Natalia Fedova, a colonel in the Russian intelligence agency FSB, with whom he has a daughter, Charlie finds his cover blown when Natalia calls him begging for help. No longer trusted by his old colleagues, Charlie is taken into custody and interrogated. He's desperate to escape and rescue his wife and child from the hit he knows the Russian government has put on them. VERDICT Freemantle has written a tense and entertaining scramble. Charlie runs various scenarios in his head to rescue his family, and the intensity of his internal struggle raises this novel a cut above standard espionage fare. Newcomers might become confused by the large cast of characters, and the ending implies more to come. For Charlie Muffin fans, this is still worth a shot.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2012
Charlie Muffin, MI5's best field agent but an unrepentant maverick, has been juggling so many balls for so longhis secret marriage to former KGB agent Natalia; the existence of their child, Sasha; his determination to find a way for his family to be togetherthat he's used to living a hidden life. But this time the balls come crashing down. Natalia is on the threshold of being outed, forcing Charlie to conceive a daredevil plan for getting her and Sasha out of Russia, but to do so, he must deceive both his superiors and the Russians. All our professional lives, he explains to Natalia, we've adjusted . . . our morality for institutions whose only morality is the expediency of the moment. . . . It's time for our own expediency. This is le Carre territory, to be surethink The Russia House (1989)and Freemantle hits every note perfectly in dramatizing the fundamental conflict between individual values and institutional machinations. On top of that, he constructs an airtight plot, full of backpedaling twists, that leads to a stunning cliff-hanger of a finale. At the end, Charlie isn't out of the woods by a long shot, but he's still very much in the game.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)