This is the sequel to the post-Cold-War spy thriller The Eighth Sister, which I reviewed here and enjoyed with caveats, but this book I flat-out loved. As I noted in the other review, the part of the previous book I liked best was when the characters were cat-and-mousing around Russia, and this book is nearly all that. In addition to that, this book features the return of my two favorite supporting characters from the previous book, one of whom was presumed dead (but isn't), and a sympathetic Russian agent who was chasing them before and is reluctantly helping them this time around, admittedly after being blackmailed into it.

The action scenes are flat-out fantastic - this book features, among other things, an escape from a high-security Russian prison, a really fun (if OTT and logistically implausible) con on the not!KGB, and a car/snowmobile/air chase through a blizzard in and around St. Petersburg that is an amazing sequence of endlessly piled-up complications and basically a demonstration of the writing principle of "take the worst thing that could happen to your character at this particular moment and then do that."

But what really makes both this and the previous book work for me is how likable the characters are. I love the tropes of spy fiction - the moral shades of gray, the ethical and human difficulties of coping with undercover work, the action sequences - but a lot of it is too bleak and not humanistic enough for me. I think a lot of what made the action scenes in this book so tense was how desperately you want all the characters to make it out alive. Even the minor characters in this and the preceding book are, on the whole, decent people (a family who smuggle refugees across the Black Sea, a random not!KGB dude who goes out of his way to do the right thing at a key moment even though it might cost him his career at the very least and his life at worst, etc). The protagonist is a guy who quit the spy game years ago and keeps getting sucked back in to help friends, and he doesn't particularly give a damn about the broader principles of patriotism or whatever is going on between his government and theirs; what he mainly wants is just to get home to his family.

I've been borrowing a lot of Kindle Unlimited books in the general category of thriller and detective mystery because I want to learn how to write it, and have bounced off a lot of it because it's simply too bleak, violent, politically conservative, and generally either too grimdark or draws the good-and-evil lines in the wrong places for me, so there was something very affirming about the discovery that you can, in fact, be successful in a very cynical genre with books that are actually very much about affirming human connection rather than tearing it down.

(On a side note, these books also might be the only Cold War-esque spy novels I've read with a black hero, which provides endless complications in trying to make himself inconspicuous in Russia...)

I don't think this book is a highly realistic depiction of what spying is actually like, but it was was a fun, exciting few hours with characters I really liked and totally snuck in as an under-the-wire Yuletide nomination, and I would absolutely read more books about them if the author ever writes any. I also hope that someday it gets optioned as a movie or a Netflix miniseries or something, because this book would be such fun in live action.