Nonetheless he does a convincing job of expressing the teetering - and bomb-shelter scary - relationship between the Soviets and Americans, through characters such as Leo, FBI agent Jim Yates, and Jesse Austin, based on African American baritone Paul Robeson. Smith is a British writer in his early 30s, far too young to have experienced the tensions of the Cold War, and he lacks the elegant story telling of a John le Carré. Luckily, one doesn't need to have read Smith's previous novels, Child 44, and The Secret Speech, to get caught up in the story of Leo, wife Raisa and teenage daughters Zoya and Elena. It is writer Tom Rob Smith's third book focusing on secret agent Leo Demidov, his family and their efforts to navigate the claustrophobic living conditions and psychological minefields of post-war Moscow. The opening line of a novel, Agent 6, published this month hints this is a book that will be hard to put down: “The safest way to write a diary was to imagine Stalin reading every word.” Immediately one understands the place and time, the paranoia and profound fear that clutched those living in the Soviet Union during the 1950s, the period of Stalin and Kruschchev.
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