The Helsinki Affair

July 1, 2023

Pitoniak's new novel (following Our American Friend) tells the complicated story of a decades-old betrayal and the decay of patriotic loyalty into disillusioned treason. A Russian apparatchik shows up at the gatehouse of the U.S. embassy in Rome, asking to speak to someone now. The CIA station chief is away, so he talks with Amanda Cole, number two in Rome. He tells her that an influential U.S. senator will die the next morning. It will look like a heart attack, but it's going to be an assassination. Amanda liaises with her boss, who orders her to do nothing, as it may be a trap to find information. Then the senator dies as predicted. Amanda's retired-CIA father hands her some notes that the senator left behind: her father is named in them. Early on, readers will realize that Amanda's father has done something terribly wrong. He'd like her to leave him out of the investigation but knows she won't. Pitoniak tantalizes by doling info out slowly: why the senator was assassinated, what Amanda's father did--maybe is still doing. The root lies in a bloody affair 20 years back in Helsinki. VERDICT Pitoniak does everything well in this twisty spy thriller that should please the most discriminating connoisseur of the genre.--David Keymer

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September 1, 2023
The sins of the father return to haunt his daughter in a long game of spycraft. Amanda Cole is dying of boredom at the sleepy Rome bureau of the CIA when a tip comes in from a Russian bureaucrat on vacation--an American senator will be assassinated the next day in Egypt. The ripple effects of this event will change the lives of both Amanda and her father, Charlie Cole, also a CIA operative. Shortly after Amanda is promoted to Rome station chief, her father gives her a stack of papers found in the late Senator Vogel's office. These papers contain notes that indicate the senator was working with a Russian oligarch to uncover a nefarious scheme involving "meme stocks" and day traders. For reasons Charlie does not understand (but can anxiously suspect), his name is written on the last page. Though part of him wishes to destroy the information, he delivers the papers to Amanda, setting in motion a complex plot that unfolds both in the present and decades earlier, during Charlie's posting in Helsinki, which is where Amanda was born. By the time he left, his marriage was over and his career permanently derailed. As in her previous book, Our American Friend(2022), Pitoniak artfully deploys all the tricks and tropes of the spy genre, and she creates for Amanda a wonderful ally--a 73-year-old CIA superstar named Kath Frost who "had sniffed out more double agents than anyone in agency history" and who shows up in "a linen dress belted at the waist, a chunky turquoise necklace, a pair of red cowboy boots. Her gray hair hung long and loose over her shoulders." The developing mentorship and friendship between Amanda and Kath as well as the unfolding of the Cole family's unhappy past give the novel emotional weight and interest that add to its espionage plot. These excellent female spy characters deserve a series.

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September 11, 2023
Pitoniak follows up 2022’s Our American Friend with another ambitious espionage thriller about a female CIA agent forced to deal with crises past and present. Amanda Cole is bored and restless in her position as deputy chief of station in Rome. When her boss bungles a job and causes the poisoning death of a U.S. senator, Cole takes over as station chief and begins investigating the murder and Russia’s role in it. In the process, she finds a disturbing document in the senator’s notes that implicates her father—CIA operative Charlie Cole, who decades ago was mysteriously demoted to the agency’s public relations office from a prestigious Cold War posting in Helsinki—in the killing. The case leads Cole on a winding pursuit that forces her to confront her father’s shortcomings, both personal and professional, while pressure mounts for her to solve the senator’s murder. Though the narrative stumbles in the middle sections—some elements, particularly a subplot on meme stocks, feel forced and overcomplicated—the startling finale saves the day. Pitoniak continues to show strong instincts for the art of cloak-and-dagger. Agents: PJ Mark and Stefanie Lieberman, Janklow & Nesbit.