No matter how many true espionage tales you have read, you will be captivated by Shaun Walker’s crackerjack The Illegals, which focuses on how Russia for decades has dispatched its citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, posing as others while doing Moscow’s bidding. The book opens in 2010, with the notorious roundup of 10 “illegals” in the United States that made a star of the real-estate broker/spy Anna Chapman, and Walker’s job as a Moscow correspondent gives him both a fresh angle on the scandal and sets the stage for much of the book being told from Russian sources. The best-known “illegals” may be the fictional ones played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys in The Americans, but Walker proves that truth can not only be stranger than fiction but far more compelling.
All of you who love snakes, raise your hand. Ah, I see exactly one hand, and it belongs to this author, whose engaging look at what he calls “a sinuous form of lightning” might not make you love snakes but will surely make you respect them. What Stephen S. Hall does brilliantly is to explore the world of a reptile that has been both venerated and feared ever since it was first encountered by humans, from Medusa’s slithering hair to Bulgari’s Serpenti jewelry line, to Snakes on a Plane,a movie so scary in its title alone that even horror fans skipped it.
