Of Our Own Device
by M.K. South
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Pub Date 1 Jun 2018 | Archive Date 13 Sep 2018
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Description
What do you do when you realize that the American Dream you've been working for isn't enough if it's yours alone? And what you're told to do will destroy the only true friend you've ever had?
Summer of 1985. Jack Smith is a rookie CIA case officer posted at the American Embassy in Moscow. Despite his gregarious nature, Jack is a lonely man: not only is he a reluctant spy, he is also gay.
When he meets Eton Volkonsky, a talented nuclear physics student, Jack's bosses instruct him to develop the Russian as a future agent. Their friendship deepens, and Jack is torn between his suspicion that Eton and friends are with the KGB and his attraction to the man. But he continues telling himself and his bosses that he is just doing his job, developing his agent.
Only when he leaves Russia does Jack admit that he has been fooling himself. He takes on assignments in various countries, with a hope that eventually they will get him back to Moscow.
As introspection and growing doubts about what he does for living torment Jack,the world is buffeted by a whirlwind of dramatic events - diplomatic and spy wars, the rise of AIDS, the Chernobyl catastrophe, the war in Afghanistan and the disintegration of the communist bloc.
Given a second chance, will Jack make the right choice?
Advance Praise
Featured Reviews
Rebel X, Reviewer
Jack Smith is a somewhat reluctant CIA agent under deep cover in soviet era Moscow in the mid 1980s. Preternaturally handsome, he is at heart a gay man, but as a spy he is whatever the company requires him to be - as an American working in Soviet Era Moscow he does whatever is required to project an image of banal heterosexuality. Jack is smart, savvy, suspicious as is required of him, while remaining empathetic and as the novel progresses, increasingly sympathetic towards the group of Russian nomenclature students he has befriended as part of his job.
Eton Volkonsky is a shy, lonely PHD student, deeply closeted due to the spurious social conditions of the time, and an avid writer. It is through his writing that most of his (beautiful) characterisation takes place. Eton is also a near genius, ambivalent nuclear physicist and passionate musician, the grandson of a Soviet nuclear physicist, ”royalty” whom, due to his mysterious family history is marked as an unwitting pawn of the CIA in Moscow.
The relationship between Jack and Eton is a tantalising slow burn of forbidden sexual tension, angst and mutual suspicion. Spanning almost a decade, three continents, and set against a back drop of real life events - from the spate of US ambassador ejections from Moscow, Chernobyl, the Soviet-Afghan war to the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is as thrilling as it is unpredictable and the last 20-30% of the book is a perfectly nail biting race to its conclusion.
At almost 300,000 words oood is an opus. Part epic love story, Cold War spy thriller, history lesson and cultural exchange, this book is a REALISTIC and meticulously researched spy thriller and one of the best books I’ve read all year.
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