Madame Didier is hanged from a door frame, “to complete the horror, to violate the gentleman’s agreement among spies and to send an unambiguous message back to the French.” The mission is completed within four minutes.
When Zyuganov and Buchina barge in on a meeting between Madeleine Didier, the Moscow station chief of the French foreign intelligence service, and a Russian source, the two French security guards are killed within 10 seconds, the Russian soon after. The scenes of them on the job are beyond chilling. Both are experts in chernaya rabota, black work. The villains too are richly drawn, none more than Alexei Zyuganov, a psychopathic torturer-bureaucrat, and his protégée, Eva Buchina. officer, is trying to lose teams of watchers, she describes the “tingling on her arms and the backs of her hands, how the air felt cool on her neck when the hairs stood on end, when she felt the coverage before she saw it and began to count the cars, filing away the faces.” “Palace of Treason” shimmers with authenticity. for 33 years, knows the world of espionage and its darkest corners is never in doubt. handler, Nathaniel Nash, with whom she makes love “against the rules, against good sense, flaunting every tenet of security.” Putin himself (blue halo pulsing), with eyebrow-raising results. There she eventually catches the eye of President Vladimir V. Enraged by the plundering of her country, Egorova is now one of the C.I.A.’s highest placed moles in the Kremlin. Matthews deftly weaves in enough back story to hook both new readers and those returning. “Palace of Treason,” the sequel to “Red Sparrow,” does not disappoint. Brave, beautiful and deadly, Egorova is a synesthete, who sees a halo of color above the heads of those around her, and a graduate of the Sparrow School, where female agents are taught advanced sexual techniques as an aid to seduction and recruitment. Lavished with deserved praise, it introduced Dominika Egorova, of the Russian Intelligence Service, one of the most complex and compelling heroines to grace the espionage genre. “Red Sparrow,” Jason Matthews’s debut thriller, is a challenging act to follow.
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