White Fox by Owen Matthews

 

This is another book in a series, but it's labeled as Book Three in a Trilogy, so I believe the stories the author has told all the stories he had to tell in Soviet Russia. At least, his main has escaped, more or less. Which is about as good an ending as he was going to have, really: I was wagering on his being murdered by his colleagues in the Committee for State Security. The characters in the three books are progressively more scarred (and more scared) by their time in the machinery of the Soviet state, and by the end, here, many of them have entirely given up hope. These are progressively less happy novels, though they do all read pretty well on their own--while the characters do continue to evolve, and their past/s do continue to accrue and to matter, there aren't big overarching stories. Matthews writes well, knows his characters and their milieu, and knows the broader history these stories are in (and in this last novel, where things really do veer off). All good stuff, all very worth reading.