Maybe we Americans were just a little bit hasty when we said that we won the Cold War? 'Cause it's seeming more and more like that we were really just leading at halftime. 
 Modern Russia with Vladimer Putin running the show is essentially the Soviet Union with a better public relations department, and the old spy games between their Foreign Intelligence Service and the American Central Intelligence Agency are back with a vengeance. Young and ambitious CIA officer Nate Nash is the Moscow handler of a highly placed Russian code-named MARBLE. When a planned meeting goes sideways Nash manages to save his asset, but he blows his own cover so badly in the process that he's exiled to Helsinki where he sulks about the setback his career has suffered. Russian intelligence knows it has a leak and is desperate to find it so they send junior agent Dominika Egorova to see if she can pry loose the name of the mole from Nash. 
 Dominika was a talented ballerina as well as a true believer in the new Russia. She is also secretly a synesthete who sees sound as colors as well as auras around people that clue her into their mental state. When her dancing career was derailed she is sucked into the spy business by her uncle who promises her position but really sees her as just a beautiful woman that he can whore out for his own purposes. Despite how her uncle uses her and the bureaucracy that thinks she only has value on her back, Dominika manages to earn a place in the intelligence service with her brains and will as she nurses hidden grudges at the way the system has treated her. After Nate and Dominika meet, a delicate dance of manipulation begins, but who is recruiting who? 
 I'm a big fan of FX's The Americans as well as currently being surrounded by a bunch of Russian consultants at the office. I'm convinced they must be secret agents running honeypot operations because there's just no way that many good looking people are a representative sample of the Russian population. (Or I'm just jealous that they're making us American office drones look like jeans wearing mole-people by comparison. Seriously, if the Cold War is really kicking off again, I'm putting my money on them.) 
 The point is that I was in the mood for a good spy vs. spy novel, and this one delivered. It won the 2014 Edgar Award for best first novel, and the author Jason Matthews is reportedly a former CIA officer who had over 30 years of service. The book is filled with the kind of details about spy operations that just feel authentic, but it never devolves into a Tom Clancy-style recitation of hardware and proper procedures because it's got plenty of human drama as well. 
 Dominika is the engine that runs the rest of the book. She's an intriguing character because of the anger and frustration she feels as someone who just wants to be permitted to do her job but is constantly used and humiliated by brutal men of limited imagination. The only false note to her is that it feels like Matthews wrote her synesthesia as giving her almost telepathic abilities when it comes to reading people. Why couldn't she just be smart and institutive instead of using a neurological disorder as a way of making her 'special'? It's becoming an overused fictional trope these days. 
 Another minor nitpick is that Matthews uses a gimmick of having the characters constantly eating or preparing food and then putting the recipe for what they had at the end of a chapter. This was kind of a neat touch at first, but after a while it felt like he was really straining to find new dishes to shoehorn into the action. Also, (This spoiler does not give away the ending but does involve a major character introduced halfway through the book.) (view spoiler)[ I initially enjoyed the female American senator character who sells secrets to the Russians. She's a complete narcissist who is so self-involved and annoyed at any potential inconveniences that she refuses to take the most basic security precautions. This seemed like the kind of motivation you might find in a traitor in the age of Facebook. However, after a while with her relentlessly bashing the US intelligence agencies at every opportunity it left me wondering if Matthews suffered at the hands of some politicians during his career and was getting a bit of fictional revenge by portraying such a character as a villain completely devoid of conscience. What started as interesting became an over the top cartoon. (hide spoiler)] 
 Still, none of my complaints seriously hurt my enjoyment of the book which was filled with great characters playing tense spy games for high stakes.