A clever mesh of contemporary and Cold-War era espionage sees a young, inexperienced but enormously talented station chief of the United States Intelligence take on forces that are remorselessly hostile, insidious, and unpredictable, in Anna Pitoniak’s edge of the seat thriller The Helsinki Affair. Amanda Cole gets a surprise and spontaneous promotion as the Station Chief of the plaid and prosaic Rome Office when a stunning piece of information provided by a frightened Russian bureaucrat turned informant Kostya Semonov is failed to be acted upon by Amanda’s intransigent senior. The inexplicable inaction unfortunately leads to a devious assassination of an influential American Senator Bob Vogel, in Cairo.

The forty-year-old Amanda Cole is now invested with the arduous responsibility of forking out more information from Semonov and assuring his safety from the notorious Russian intelligence machineries, the GRU and the FSB. Amanda’s investigation into the Vogel murder takes a sinister turn when a secret file being cobbled together by Senator Vogel before his untimely demise contains references to Amanda’s father Charlie Cole, a former CIA veteran.

This damning revelation takes Amanda on a globe-trotting mission from Moscow to New York. However, the core of her investigation lies in a small island outside Kaivopuisto park, northwest of Länsi-Mustasaari, Särkkä. Helsinki also happens to be Charlie Cole’s final field posting with the CIA, before a failed marriage and a blotched mission led him to a mundane desk job in the United States. What does Charlie Cole, Helsinki and Särkkä have to do with the killing of a powerful American politician?

In the company of the sardonic, but quick-thinking Katherine Frost, one of the agencies most critical Russian experts, Amanda painstakingly begins to piece together myriad pieces of a dangerous jigsaw puzzle that has frightening ramifications for world trade. A megalomaniacal Russian President, a deadly femme fatale with a power to hold the Western powers at ransom, a corrupt oligarch torn between love for his family and loyalty to his native country contrive to make The Helsinki Affair a robust read. While shorn of high-octane action, usually the prerogative of Robert Ludlum novels, Ms. Pitoniak’s book has shades of the dangerous sedateness of Len Deighton and the subtle dexterity of Ian Rankin.

Amanda Cole is the unlikeliest of female protagonists, yet the most ideal to crack insurmountable mysteries. The passages where she converses with and confronts her father make for some riveting reading. The conflicting human emotions in terms of frailty, and confidence, vulnerability, and determination thread through the pages of Ms. Pitoniak’s book.

The Helsinki Affair is a novel that leaves no doubt about the fact that Ms. Pitoniak is an author to reckon with and look forward to when it comes to the genre of espionage!