Books like The Moscow Club

I had high hopes for The Moscow Club. An espionage novel written by an ex-intelligence professional, set during a fascinating point in recent history (1991, the twilight of the Soviet Union)…I was looking forward to a intelligent, reality-based thriller, maybe with some intelligence-community inside baseball thrown in for good measure.Oh, well.The premise isn’t bad: an intelligence analyst stumbles across what appears to be a developing plot by Kremlin insiders to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in a coup. If you’re of a certain age, you may remember that such a thing actually happened briefly in the last days of the USSR. Had Finder just gone with the general reality of the period and populated his novel with characters drawn from the basket of vipers who actually made up the Politburo and the rest of the Soviet top leadership at the time, and had given us a flavor of the rising chaos and disintegration within the USSR, he’d have had enough material for several high-wire thrillers.Instead, he falls back on a creaky old trope: the Global Cabal of Powerful Men who are omniscient and omnipotent (stop me if you’ve heard this story before), can kill anyone with total impunity, can suborn resources from their respective governments without any repercussions, and have somehow despite the breadth and scope of their organization managed to keep a web of secrets for forty-plus years.Yes, it’s SPECTRE (or KAOS) all over again.Our Hero, of course, manages to continually escape the Cabal’s clutches, even though it kills everyone he looks at twice (not a spoiler; you’ve read this story before) and essentially turns the entire Western world against him. There’s also the requisite beautiful-estranged-wife-he-still-loves, long-buried family secrets, a secret CIA splinter group, and a second Cabal of Powerful Men that shows up late in the story to help move the plot around some more. No Rosa Klebb or giant henchman with metal teeth in this one, but that’s about the only furniture missing from this well-used set.Don’t get me wrong – the book is competently written (Finder’s constant head-hopping probably bugs me more as a writer than as a reader), the cast members hit their marks consistently, the settings are well-rendered, the sex scenes aren’t egregious, and the action is well-staged. It’ll make a fine action movie sometime. If you come into this with the right expectations and are just looking for a way to pass that transcontinental flight, you’ll be fine.Perhaps the cardinal sin here is that despite the silliness, The Moscow Club takes itself very seriously. Brett Battles’ Sick uses nearly all these same tropes but has the sense to have its hero wink at the stock goings-on. Here, after Our Hero’s fifth or sixth hair’s-breadth escape in the first half of the book, I stopped believing in most of what was happening on the page.I’ll admit it: based on its pedigree, I came to The Moscow Club expecting LeCarre or McCarry and instead got a standard global-conspiracy thriller. As such, it’s my fault I was disappointed. It could have been so much more.If it’s a global-conspiracy thriller you seek, The Moscow Club is one of the smarter ones around. It’ll give you a few hours of thrills and spills. Don’t expect to be surprised by much of what happens, though, and don’t expect to learn much about real espionage.