Britain’s MI5 tolerates Charlie Muffin because he’s their best field agent. What none of his colleagues knows, though, is that he is married to Natalia Fedova, a colonel in the FSB, the Russian intelligence successor to the KGB. It’s a secret that could land her in front of a firing squad, and him in jail for life. Worst of all, their daughter would then end up in a Russian state orphanage.
But a frantic call from Natalia has brought their secret out, and Charlie must lead a combined MI5/MI6 mission to rescue her. He soon realizes that his higher-ups have other priorities than his family’s safety. Charlie will have to outwit not just the Russians but his own government as well to protect the lives of his wife and child.
Clever, unpredictable, and exciting, Red Star Burning shows why Brian Freemantle has been widely praised as one of the greatest living espionage novelists.
When a dead man’s disfigured body is discovered on the grounds of the British embassy in Moscow, MI5 veteran Charlie Muffin is charged with solving the murder. Not an easy task, given porous security at the embassy and Russian obstructionism, but a good fit for his unusual talents all the same. As Muffin navigates a political maze on the home front, and plays a chess match with his counterparts in the host country, it’s obvious that the man’s death is significant, but the whys and hows are maddeningly elusive. More important to Muffin is his hoped-for reunion with Natalia, the former KGB agent to whom he’s secretly married, and their daughter, Sasha—but, for safety’s sake, he can barely see them. Alternately cautious and daring, self-critical, pragmatic, and fatalistically idealistic, the maverick Muffin will appeal to fans of John le Carré’s George Smiley and to readers of classic espionage novels. The USSR is now Russia, and the KGB is now the FSB, but this is still a story of telephone booths and old-school spycraft—old-school quality, too. --Keir Graff
Description:
Britain’s MI5 tolerates Charlie Muffin because he’s their best field agent. What none of his colleagues knows, though, is that he is married to Natalia Fedova, a colonel in the FSB, the Russian intelligence successor to the KGB. It’s a secret that could land her in front of a firing squad, and him in jail for life. Worst of all, their daughter would then end up in a Russian state orphanage.
But a frantic call from Natalia has brought their secret out, and Charlie must lead a combined MI5/MI6 mission to rescue her. He soon realizes that his higher-ups have other priorities than his family’s safety. Charlie will have to outwit not just the Russians but his own government as well to protect the lives of his wife and child.
Clever, unpredictable, and exciting, Red Star Burning shows why Brian Freemantle has been widely praised as one of the greatest living espionage novelists.
From Publishers Weekly
Last seen in 2002's Kings of Many Castles, working-class British spy Charlie Muffin once again proves that experience and intelligence (on the part of both author and hero) are at least as important as flying fists and explosions in this entertaining entry in Freemantle's long-running series. When a faceless body turns up on the grounds of the British Embassy in Moscow, Charlie's superiors send him to Russia to solve the mystery: who's the corpse and why was he left face down, or rather no face down, in the flower garden? Nothing is as it seems as the Russian authorities wrestle with the British over who has jurisdiction, whose agents are the bigger liars, and whose government is the most underhanded. Charlie isn't much for action, gunplay, and excitement. In fact, his relationship with his Russian intelligence officer wife, Natalie, and daughter Sasha provides most of the overt suspense, but his slow fitting together of all the pieces related to the crime provides genuine interest.
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From Booklist
When a dead man’s disfigured body is discovered on the grounds of the British embassy in Moscow, MI5 veteran Charlie Muffin is charged with solving the murder. Not an easy task, given porous security at the embassy and Russian obstructionism, but a good fit for his unusual talents all the same. As Muffin navigates a political maze on the home front, and plays a chess match with his counterparts in the host country, it’s obvious that the man’s death is significant, but the whys and hows are maddeningly elusive. More important to Muffin is his hoped-for reunion with Natalia, the former KGB agent to whom he’s secretly married, and their daughter, Sasha—but, for safety’s sake, he can barely see them. Alternately cautious and daring, self-critical, pragmatic, and fatalistically idealistic, the maverick Muffin will appeal to fans of John le Carré’s George Smiley and to readers of classic espionage novels. The USSR is now Russia, and the KGB is now the FSB, but this is still a story of telephone booths and old-school spycraft—old-school quality, too. --Keir Graff