The following review that originally appeared in Critics at Large is reproduced on this site because spying by its very nature depends upon committing transgressions and lines are crossed when a head of state supports the death of a foreign national.
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| Author and former CIA agent Jason Matthews. (Photo: Booktopia) |
"The world would know that the secret services of Russia were omniscient apex predators that could penetrate the governments of his enemies, discover their secrets, and exert their will over them... His active measures were creating lasting discord in the West, at minimal cost, and if he wanted to unseat an American politician, he had only to release an embarrassing, unencrypted email through WikiLeaks run by the languid dupe hiding in that exiguous Latin embassy in London. Partisan political hysteria now gripping American society would do the rest."
– Jason Matthews, The Kremlin's Candidate
The Kremlin's Candidate (Scribner, 2018) is the third and most compelling novel in Jason Matthews's Red Sparrow trilogy, concluding the series that began with Red Sparrow and continued with Palace of Treason. The final novel picks up with a prologue set in 2005, in which Audrey Rowland, an American naval officer and a scientist on a brief assignment to Moscow, is lured into a honey-trap for the purpose of blackmail by Dominika Egorova, a Russian spy. The former ballerina began her career as a trained seductress in Red Sparrow, in which her first major assignment was to seduce CIA spy, Nate Nash, the handler for a Soviet mole, and secure his identity. Instead, she was turned by Nash into becoming a CIA mole in the Kremlin and he becomes her handler and lover. Fortunately, she has the protective advantage of being a synesthete, able to judge the intentions of others by the colours she sees emanating from them.