Red Star Rising

June 21, 2010
Last seen in 2002's Kings of Many Castles, working-class British spy Charlie Muffin once again proves that experience and intelligence (on the part of both author and hero) are at least as important as flying fists and explosions in this entertaining entry in Freemantle's long-running series. When a faceless body turns up on the grounds of the British Embassy in Moscow, Charlie's superiors send him to Russia to solve the mystery: who's the corpse and why was he left face down, or rather no face down, in the flower garden? Nothing is as it seems as the Russian authorities wrestle with the British over who has jurisdiction, whose agents are the bigger liars, and whose government is the most underhanded. Charlie isn't much for action, gunplay, and excitement. In fact, his relationship with his Russian intelligence officer wife, Natalie, and daughter Sasha provides most of the overt suspense, but his slow fitting together of all the pieces related to the crime provides genuine interest.

July 1, 2010
When a dead mans disfigured body is discovered on the grounds of the British embassy in Moscow, MI5 veteran Charlie Muffin is charged with solving the murder. Not an easy task, given porous security at the embassy and Russian obstructionism, but a good fit for his unusual talents all the same. As Muffin navigates a political maze on the home front, and plays a chess match with his counterparts in the host country, its obvious that the mans death is significant, but the whys and hows are maddeningly elusive. More important to Muffin is his hoped-for reunion with Natalia, the former KGB agent to whom hes secretly married, and their daughter, Sashabut, for safetys sake, he can barely see them. Alternately cautious and daring, self-critical, pragmatic, and fatalistically idealistic, the maverick Muffin will appeal to fans of John le Carr's George Smiley and to readers of classic espionage novels. The USSR is now Russia, and the KGB is now the FSB, but this is still a story of telephone booths and old-school spycraftold-school quality, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)