Red Traitor by Owen Matthews

 

So it turns out that *Black Dawn* is the first book of a trilogy. This is the second. Like the first two, It's a a spy thriller mostly, with much less of Mystery about it, and a lot of Soviet Russian internal politics, which means authoritarian as hell, and survival is more or less the same as winning. There are some good characters, here: The main, Alexander Vasin, is clearly a detective at his core, not a spy or counterspy; his boss Orlov is pretty despicable (as are all the Politburo types); most of the people in the novel can fairly be described as "morally murky." The tension spins out really well, conveying just how close the Cuban Missile Crisis came to spiraling out of control to a nuclear exchange (and even though the USSR didn't have anything like the intercontinental reach it wanted the world to believe it did, there's nothing about "nuclear exchange* that is a good outcome). A really good book, and I'm looking forward to the third book in the trilogy, which is at this moment at the bottom of my checked-out to-read stack.