The Kremlin Letter

by Noel Behn

On the surface, it’s one of those men-with-a-mission things, like The Guns of Navarone. But when you read it, you feel like you’re reading Chekhov. It’s an incredibly dense, incredibly dark, incredibly closely described novel, and it’s only really nominally about espionage. What it’s really about is extraordinarily brutalist and cynical men, betraying each other. It’s the only spy thriller that I’ve read that I really thought, ‘Oh God, that is just a bit too unpleasant.’