Book Review: The Helsinki Affair by Anna Pitoniak

Rising up, the very last thing Amanda Cole thought she wished to be was a spy. Her grandfather was within the CIA as was her father Charlie, and he or she’d seen firsthand the pressure the job had placed on her mother and father’ marriage. Now on the age of forty, she’s fortunately single and fewer contentedly second-in-command of the CIA’s Rome desk. Rome is good, however savvy, gifted Amanda needs she may spend her days really doing the job she’s skilled for as a substitute of whiling away her hours in consolation and abject boredom.

Even so, she’s skilled sufficient to have little time for an unlikely informant displaying up at her station’s gates someday. When Russian bureaucrat Kostya Semonov claims that his info has to do with an impending assassination try on highly effective American Senator Bob Vogel, nonetheless, Amanda takes the assembly. After listening to his story, she’s satisfied that his intel is legit. Alas, her station chief doesn’t really feel the identical method.

When the worst occurs and Amanda’s beliefs are vindicated, she’s given higher duties, together with supervision of Semonov earlier than he’s despatched again to Russia to collect extra intel for her. However a secret file Vogel had been placing collectively makes its method to her father, who finds himself listed in it as an individual of curiosity regardless of having labored solely for the CIA’s public relations wing for many years. Charlie Cole’s profession in energetic espionage, if not his whole life, had taken a downward flip after his disastrous posting to Helsinki forty years in the past. It’s not an period he needs to revisit, so he punts making a choice concerning the file to his daughter, handing it to her and asking her to maintain his identify as distant from the case as attainable.

Amanda is aware of immediately that she has to convey the file to the eye of her superior. What she’s much less certain about is mentioning her father in relation to it:

She needed to come clear about Charlie’s unusual request; needed to inform the director that her father was clearly hiding one thing. It was now or by no means. Come on, she thought. Begin speaking. Proper now. Proper now! However there, within the thick silence, it out of the blue occurred to her. The plain end result of telling [her boss was that the] battle of curiosity was obvious. She, as [Charlie’s] daughter, would immediately lose the project.

 

However she badly wished to see this by way of. The Russians assassinating an American politician was uncharted territory. Plus, Amanda was the particular person Semonov trusted. What if, by eradicating herself, she destroyed any likelihood at progress?

As Amanda delves additional into the case, she begins to uncover the true purpose the Russians wished Vogel lifeless. With the assistance of CIA savant Kath Frost, she unravels a breath-taking world conspiracy to control the world’s markets. However she additionally discovers particulars concerning the clandestine acts that led to her father’s profession downfall, and that maybe proceed to maintain him compromised. How will she reconcile her want for justice along with her need to guard her father from hurt?

Amanda Cole is a captivating character: sensible, compassionate and typically fully oblivious to what a jerk she’s being. She looks like a totally realized particular person, and never simply one of many cardboard caricatures that lead far too many cerebral spy novels. Kath, her biggest ally, is an absolute delight, as the 2 ladies bond over the misogyny they’ve confronted of their careers from their very own individuals. Extra importantly, Kath tempers Amanda’s extra knee-jerk responses, in a partnership I’m desirous to see far more of.

However the true star of The Helsinki Affair is Anna Pitoniak’s nuanced view of espionage and its historical past. As Abe Romanoff, the American ambassador to Russia, says to Amanda over breakfast someday:

“Have you learnt why the Chilly Conflict lasted so long as it did?”

 

“As a result of they wished to kill us and we wished to kill them.”

 

He smiled, bemused by her tone[.] “That was a part of it, after all. However, additionally, it’s as a result of sure individuals had been having fun with themselves an excessive amount of to cease. Not most individuals. Most individuals aren’t that merciless. However a couple of highly effective individuals, on their facet and on ours: They beloved the sport. They beloved having an enemy, having a campaign. My God, you look again on these years they usually appear nearly baroque. Double brokers. Triple brokers. Mole hunts. Conspiracies inside conspiracies.”

Cruelty, Ms Pitoniak posits, could also be extra environment friendly in getting issues achieved within the short-term. Within the longer view, nonetheless, it solely perpetuates pointless struggling, not simply of the individuals concerned, however of innocents caught in cruelty’s outward-moving ripple.

Nowhere is that this extra evident than within the loneliness that permeates the e-book’s closing pages. Espionage, this e-book infers, is a discipline which displays again onto its practitioners. Charity comes again to you, as does cowardice. The trick, as Amanda learns because the gripping narrative unfolds, is in navigating between the 2 and holding onto the values you understand to be true and worthwhile, not simply what’s simpler to do or imagine.

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