This is a well written spy novel.
I really enjoyed this book. There was good characterisation. The plot kept me interested.
It is a good book full of mystery

It took me a little time to get into this spy novel but it was enjoyable enough in the end. I haven't read the first in the series but works as a standalone. Not sure I'd carry on with the series myself but glad I dipped my toes in.

Thanks to the publisher for an eArc copy via NetGalley.

Loved the Cold War setting, obviously a lot of research was done. My heart went out to Ted the main character who is trying to find his way in the world as a journalist but through his naivity is put into situations way beyond his world knowledge. I will be reading the next book The Wolves of Lewinsky Prospekt to follow Martha's story.

I was confused at the beginning of the book, I wasn't too sure what was going on and then I realised that this was part of a series and the recurring characters had stuff going on that was going over my head because I didn't have the context of the first book. Most of the book was set on Moscow not in Bucharest so the title was a little misleading. It was an OK spy book, if a little boring in parts.

Quite an enjoyable read, and a more realistic look at the mundane details of the world of spying and the Cold War in the 1970s, more Le Carre than James Bond. However, I’m not quite sure what was the point of setting the first part in Bucharest and even giving the book that title, as most of the action takes place in Moscow.

The Starlings of Bucharest

This is the second in the Moscow Wolves series of novels, following on from The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt. I’ve been told by other readers that here we meet some of it’s characters, but from a different perspective. Our hero is Edward Walker, known as Ted. He’s trying to make his way as a journalist in London, after leaving the working class fishing village he grew up in for something different. His career hasn’t taken off as he would have liked and he’s drifting into debt. So when he gets the chance to work for a film magazine, with an assignment to travel to Romania and interview a famous film director he jumps at the opportunity. However, this is the 1970s and Romania is in the grip of Communism. A visiting Westerner is very likely to be treated with suspicion and his plans to travel on to the Moscow film festival could be equally eventful. This sets the scene for an intelligent and different thriller.

For the first few chapters of the book I felt thoroughly confused by what was going on, but I started to realise that Ted is also very confused. He has a driver/ guide but each day he expects to meet with his interviewee and it doesn’t seem to happen. There was a random comical moment where his guide asked if he could have Ted’s trousers when he left. The author creates an atmospheric picture of the these complex destinations and all their contradictions. Ted notes that people are picking lime blossom in the park and observes that they’re so hungry they’re eating from the trees. His guide corrects him, they’re picking lime blossom to make tea. The author conveys the lovely, well maintained public spaces and the lack of unsightly advertising hoardings that are the usual in the West. Yet, there is a drabness to everything. The food is bad, the clothes are dull and shops seem empty. Ted observes: ‘It was just a place of waiting and brown paint’. Then there are the restrictions and the guide who’s really a minder, ready to challenge every wrong or damaging assumption made.There were moments where I was just an unsure as Ted about what was really going on. The first time was very early on in Bucharest, when his guide diverts him to a lakeside where a group of men are fishing. All at the same time, Ted observes how beautiful it is but also how isolated, just the sort of place you might take someone to kill them. I really felt like I was in Cold War Europe. Equally, the sections in London felt like the 1970s, slightly worn and decaying, with seedy bedsits, a sense of desperation and simmering violence.

I was interested in the incredible detail the security services go into when looking for recruits. It’s a master class in psychological manipulation. They consider everything about the subject - his clothing, his food and drink choices, his likes and dislikes. They watch behaviour. Who do they trust? Who is important to them? They look in their waste bins and listen to their phone calls. What they’re looking for is a weakness. A way in. Whatever it takes to turn them. Then they bring in the bait - if he has a weakness for women, then a beautiful woman to tempt him from the straight and narrow. I’m a trained therapist and I could learn a thing or two from the listening skills employed. They’re looking for chinks in the armour. Something they can exploit. For Ted that could be a case of never feeling heard or valued. His concern about wanting to get on. It could even be his naivety, decency and willingness to help. So, Ted is noticed by security services and when he returns to Moscow for the film festival he is watched carefully.

What was most interesting to me, was how Soviet agents used class difference as leverage. We’re used to public schoolboy spies, recruited at Oxbridge and I think this could even have been exploited a bit more. He notices that there are opportunities for people from working class backgrounds in Moscow, perhaps more than in England. This is the chink in Ted’s armour and leaves him open to exploitation in a regime where security services have an ideology to push. There were sections that plodded a bit, but that’s maybe because Ted is a very steady, plodding sort of character. He wants to break into Fleet Street as a journalist but I doubt that he has the sheer brass neck and ambition it takes to get there. He seems like a man who will always end up where he is by accident rather than design. As one character observes ‘any idiot can be a useful one’. The author kept me guessing all the way through. We are learning as Ted is learning, and he does a lot of growing up too. Aside from the George Smiley series, the historical era of the 1970s Cold War hasn’t often been depicted in spy fiction, so I felt I was reading something new in the genre. All in all the stage is set for an interesting book three in this intelligent and unusual series.

I had not realised that this is book 2 in a series so felt like I was not privy to some information. I enjoyed it but wished I had read the first book in the series.

There seem to be distinct and separate periods that attract the writers of the espionage thriller. There’s the many WWII-set novels of the likes of Alan Furst or John Lawton or the hyper-modern techno-thrillers of Charles Cumming and the acolytes of the Tom Clancy brand. You can see the sense of both approaches. The period thrillers have the advantage of spycraft unencumbered by the advances in modern technology and the benefit of a (more) morally ambiguous antagonist. The modern ones benefit from the use of that same technology to the point of fetishisation (if not a downright exaggeration that sometimes pushes these works into the realms of SF) and a sense of ‘ripped from the headlines’ cultural zeitgeist.
What seems to be less common are thrillers mining the rich potential of the 1970s high-era of the Cold War. There are a few, of course, but they appear to me to be rather few and far between. You can understand why, of course. It’s a period dominated by the Smiley novels of John Le Carre — and in particular the superlative Karla Trilogy. The comparison is inevitably unfair but I suspect unavoidable and Sarah Armstrong does great work here in breaking this inadvertent literary monopoly.
Not that The Starlings of Bucharest is in any way derivative or a mere copy of other works. It very much breaks its own ground and has some interesting things to say particularly on Britain’s class divide and how that could potentially be leveraged by Soviet agents. It’s a refreshing innovation in a genre that’s usually dominated by the machinations of various stripes of emotionally stunted public schoolboy.
Indeed, it’s the brief UK-set sections of the novel that really shine to me and Armstrong is brilliant at capturing the sense of cultural decay and the brooding atmosphere of incipient street violence in urban England of the mid-to-late 1970s. By contrast, the early Bucharest section never seems to lift off the page and while entertaining enough in terms of getting the plot going has little more vibrancy or life than your average Wikipedia page. The longer Moscow section fares a little better and Armstrong has clearly done her research but it never feels like anything more than that — research. There is little in the way of emotional connection to place felt by any of the characters, even those who are natives; nor is there much more than a cursory sense of cultural dislocation displayed by the central protagonists. Or at least certainly not to anything like the same level of the UK sections.
In fact, I think I would have liked to see the book lean more into the class conflict. The comparison and contrast between class consciousness, from the working class point-of-view, is raised more than once but seems somehow tentative and that Armstrong more than once seems to pull her punches. Which is a shame because it is an aspect that potentially lifts the novel from being a mere period piece to giving it a real cultural currency and a connection to the modern zeitgeist.
Part of the issue, I suspect, is that this conflict needs to be demonstrated more through character than it is in the novel. Take, for instance, the character of Christopher, the British embassy official in Moscow. He’s a pivotal character and one very much in the Le Carre mould. And yet he feels just too sketchily drawn. There’s a clear ambivalence between Christopher and Ted Walker, the central protagonist, one which both men explicitly state but which is only occasionally demonstrated through actual interaction. I’d have liked to have seen just a few of the character flourishes that made characters like even second-tier Smiley characters like Bill Haydon or Jerry Westerby leap from the page.
It’s a problem that I feel affects the characterisation of Ted also. The book drags not in plot but in having a rather plodding and, well, occasionally boring central protagonist. For someone with ambitions to become a Fleet Street journalist of the 1970s, Ted seems to display an alarming lack of nous or self-awareness. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. The character of the ingénue caught in the machinations of the far more devious individuals and institutions around them can often be used to great effect in these kinds of narratives and yet feels slightly lacking here.
Perhaps a useful comparison might be with Graham Greene’s 1978 novel The Human Factor. Both books explore what might drive an apparently upright individual to become a traitor to their country but the Greene benefits from having the author’s trademark cynicism and scabrously ironic scalpelling of its central protagonist. Starlings, I feel, could have benefited from a similar treatment, perhaps offering the reader some of the seething resentments and contradictions in character that Ted is still too young and self-obsessed to provide himself.
But despite the flaws of this at times rather flat characterisation and sense of locale, this is nonetheless a relentless page-turner of a novel and I’d certainly be very inclined to read more, especially from the intriguing direction hinted at in the next book.

Please allow me first to ask one simple question: will Ms. Armstrong bring Ted Walker back soon in another installment of her stunning series "Moscow wolves?" Because she definitely left me hanging and begging for more.

The Starlings of Bucharest is the suspenseful and at times menacing story of a young and naive Englishman navigating the treacherous waters of Eastern Europe in the mid 70s. An aspiring journalist, Ted is send first to Bucharest in order to interview a famous film director then on to Moscow to attend an international film festival. Yet unbeknownst to him,Ted may soon fall into a dangerous trap that could change his life forever....
Redolent of the Soviet paranoia that permeated Western Europe between 1975 and 1989, this incredible novel takes the reader into the murky and often absurd world of espionage and counter-espionage so prevalent during the last years of the Cold War. Very atmospheric and full of great historical details, this book was unputdownable and kept me guessing until the end & unfortunately beyond... So yes I do hope that Ms. Armstrong will be kind enough to bring back Edward Walker into my life once again!
A fiendishly clever novel to be enjoyed without moderation!

Many thanks to Netgalley and Sandstone for giving me the chance to read this wonderful novel prior to its release date