Red Sparrow

Eric Ambler’s quite short spy thrillers are perfect for short-haul flights, say two hours at the airport and three hours in the air.

For longer flights try novels in the same genre by Jason Matthews. He wrote his first novel, Red Sparrow, in 2013 when he was 62 and followed on with two more: Palace of Treason (2015) and The Kremlin’s Candidate (2018). He died three years ago and this is his literary legacy.

He’s not as good as John le Carré, but who is. Red Sparrow is well plotted, a page-turner, with enough action and sex to keep me interested – most enjoyable actually. It trumpets its authenticity with way too much use of initials. Here’s a few to get you started. SDR (surveillance detection route), FSB (Federal Security Service), NPPD (nitrophenylpentadienal), SVR (Russia’s external intelligence agency), COS (Chief of Station), AVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Academy), CE/ROD (Central Eurasia/ Russian Ops Desk), FCI (American Foreign Counter-Intelligence), SSCI (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence), Line KR (Russian External Counter-Intelligence). They are all explained once, but only once, so you’d best pay attention. A glossary would help.

You should be curious about Jason Matthews, I was. Why did it take until he was 62 to get his first book published? My curiosity was satisfied by his potted biography at the end of the book.

”Jason Matthews is a retired officer in the CIA’s former Operations Directorate, now the National Clandestine Service. Over a thirty-three-year career he served in multiple overseas locations and engaged in clandestine collection of national security intelligence, specializing in denied-area operations. Matthews conducted recruitment operations against Soviet-East European, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean targets and, as Chief in various CIA Stations, managed covert-action projects against the weapons-of-mass-destruction programs of the world’s rogue states and collaborated with foreign liaison partners in counterterrorism operations. He lives in Southern California.”

In Acknowledgements Jason Matthews says: “Of course the book would not have come to pass without a career in the CIA, a life I shared with hundreds of colleagues beginning with my career trainee class, and including lifelong friends made in Langley and in all the foreign postings over thirty-three years. A number of them are still relatively young. I salute all of them. … Finally, I thank my wife, Suzanne, herself a thirty-four year veteran of the CIA, for sharing an endlessly varied life with me, for the late nights, and the surveillance nights, and the evacuation nights, and for raising two sublime daughters … “

So that’s why all those acronyms trip off his pen so readily.