{"id":1439,"date":"2018-07-02T13:35:59","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T12:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=1439"},"modified":"2018-07-02T13:35:59","modified_gmt":"2018-07-02T12:35:59","slug":"review-the-kremlins-candidate-by-jason-matthews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/review-the-kremlins-candidate-by-jason-matthews\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Kremlin&#8217;s Candidate, by Jason Matthews"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, not <em>that<\/em> candidate.\u00a0 In spite of making every effort to keep up with today&#8217;s headlines (references to the Russian seizure of Crimea, North Korea&#8217;s nuclear programme and so on), author Jason Matthews never imagines for a moment that Vladimir Putin could have a hand in choosing an American president.\u00a0 That would be absurd.\u00a0 A CIA director, maybe.\u00a0 But not not even the most vivid imagination among thriller writers would have imagined what we have now.<\/p>\n<p>Matthews&#8217; <em>Red Sparrow<\/em> trilogy ends with this volume, and has its centre the inexorable rise to power of a CIA agent inside the ranks of the Russian intelligence services.\u00a0 Lest anyone thinks that idea implausible, remember that in its day, the feared Okhrana &#8212; the Tsar&#8217;s secret intelligence service &#8212; managed to plant agents that rose to the very tops of the underground organisation against which it fought.\u00a0 Among those were super-agents like Ievno Azef among the Socialist Revolutionaries, and in the Bolshevik ranks &#8212; Roman Malinovsky and Josef Stalin.\u00a0 Matthews&#8217; world is one in which the CIA are all decent chaps (though some are bunglers), and the Russians mostly monsters.\u00a0 There&#8217;s even the occasional, casual racism (in particularly, a scene set in Sudan), which does not help.\u00a0 But overall, the trilogy is a good read and maybe, with luck, there&#8217;s even another volume in the works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, not that candidate.\u00a0 In spite of making every effort to keep up with today&#8217;s headlines (references to the Russian seizure of Crimea, North Korea&#8217;s nuclear programme and so on), author Jason Matthews never imagines&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1440,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1441,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions\/1441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}