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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
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English
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THE MERCENARY

Paul Vidich

Moscow, 1985. The Soviet Union and its communist regime are in the last stages of decline, but remain opaque to the rest of the world - and still very dangerous. In this ever-shifting landscape, a senior KGB officer - code name GAMBIT - has approached the CIA Moscow Station chief with top secret military weapons intelligence and asked to be exfiltrated. GAMBIT demands that his handler be a former CIA officer, Alex Garin, a former KGB officer who defected to the American side.

The CIA had never successfully exfiltrated a KGB officer from Moscow, and the top brass do not trust Garin. But they have no other options: GAMBIT's secrets could be the deciding factor in the Cold War. Garin is able to gain the trust of GAMBIT, but remains an enigma. Is he a mercenary acting in self-interest or are there deeper secrets from his past that would explain where his loyalties truly lie? As the date nears for GAMBIT's exfiltration, and with the walls closing in on both of them, Garin begins a relationship with a Russian agent and sets into motion a plan that could compromise everything.

Paul Vidich is the acclaimed author of three previous novels, including The Coldest Warrior, also available from Pegasus Crime. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, LitHub, CrimeReads, Fugue, The Nation, Narrative Magazine, Wordriot, and others.
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Published 2021-02-01 by Pegasus Books

Comments

UK: No Exit Press;

“The Mercenary is fast paced and action packed, but Vidich lingers long enough to allow readers to experience Garin's emotional highs and lows. In that regard, the novel deservedly draws comparisons to John le Carré's tales of the intrepid spy George Smiley.”

"With this outing, Vidich enters the upper ranks of espionage thriller writers."

"A terse and convincing thriller. This stand-alone work reaches a new level of moral complexity and brings into stark relief the often contradictory nature of spycraft."

"A fast-moving and emotionally powerful ride into the darkness of both spying and the battered soul."

"Paul Vidich has staked himself a claim as one of the foremost espionage novelists working today, and he's back this year with The Mercenary, an insightful and thought-provoking story about the attempted exfiltration of a KGB man from 1980s Moscow. Vidich's characters are always rich, well-developed, and just on the border of unknowable, a perfect balance of shifting identity and allegiance. In short, this promises to be one of the year's premier spy novels." (The Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2021)

"Evoking without imitating classic le Carré . . . Vidich supplements the world-weariness we expect from cold warriors in the game too long by giving Garin a satisfyingly contrarian 'contempt for Agency puppetteers.'"

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