Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith

Part 3 of the Leo Demidov trilogy

Smith takes us back to 1950, when Leo sees and contrives a less than successful meeting with his future wife, the former WWII refugee now school teacher, Raisa. A black American singer, Jesse Austin, favors the communist philosophy and is making a tour of Russia. Leo is part of the security detail. Austin is no dope and realizes that his handlers in Moscow are showing him only the best that communism can display and appeals to Leo to show him a more typical market, a basic school, anything that is more the norm and not a showpiece.  They steal away to a market, then to Raisa's school where Jesse is so taken with Raisa that he asks Leo to bring her to his concert that night (even though Leo's relationship with Raisa is, at this time, mostly contrived).

Flash forward 15 years. Mid 1960s and the height of the Cold War. Leo has given up the police life for a simple factory manager position. Raisa has risen in the educational hierarchy to the point where she and their 2 daughters are part of a goodwill friendship  tour by a school age choir of New York  City and Washington, DC. Their youngest daughter, Elena, has been courted by a mid 20s-ish propaganda officer and the two of them work out a plan to resurrect the fledgling career of Jesse Austin, convincing him that his voice needs to be heard. The NYC concert is at the United Nations and Jesse takes his voice to the protests in the street. Elena sneaks out after the concert to be with Jesse. Her mom follows. A shot rings out and Jesse falls. The ensuing chaos leads to an unspeakable tragedy that will follow Leo for the rest of his life.

In a bottomless funk for 6-7 years, Leo tries to sneak out of Russia to investigate his family's undoing, but he is captured and given a choice: the gulags or an assignment in Afghanistan.

Leo is one of the first Russian advisors tasked with training a new secret police force. He goes native in housing, dress, appearance, and in his use of opium to numb his sorrow. He has one promising student, Nara Mir. Smith takes us through a series of local events that demonstrates Nara's potential as an agent while Leo tries to impress on Nara the need to maintain her humanity. An atrocity on a village, the ensuing Russian's investigation, and Leo's attempt to do the right thing put the two of them and a very young girl who miraculously survived the attack on the run to Pakistan and Leo's desperate hope of asylum in the US.

Now he can really investigate what happened the day Jesse Austin was murdered and how it tore his family to pieces.

I read a few reviews of this book and most said that this was the weakest book of the trilogy. And as a standalone, I might agree. But when read in the context of three integrated stories (I read these 3 almost straight through), I thought Smith expertly continued this grand story of one man's rise, then a fall into the depths of despair, only for Leo to spend the next 20ish years trying for personal redemption. One might see this series as very Dickens-esque in its scope. I wonder if the reviewers would have had the same comments had these three books been bound in a single volume and revised slightly according to the overall timeline. As one massive volume, this would have been upwards of 1300 pages (each are pretty big reads). Then it would might have been viewed as a grand novel of postwar Russian life told through Leo's experiences. For a captivating experience, make the commitment and read the 3 in order (Child 44, The Secret Speech, Agent 6).

East Coast Don