An instant contender for the best thriller of 2023! Moscow X is phenomenal and enters the pantheon of all-time great USA/Russia espionage novels, joining the likes of DeMille’s The Charm School, Matthew’s Red Sparrow and Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. David McCloskey has crafted a remarkable story brimming with intrigue and suspense that will leave you completely spent and astounded.
Sia Fox is a lawyer for a London law firm that specializes in hiding dirty money for the ultra-wealthy. Max Castillo runs the family business breeding racehorses in Mexico. They are also CIA officers in the middle of a daring operation designed by the CIA’s Moscow X division leader Artemis Proctor to sow chaos in Russia. Their mission is to recruit Vadim, one of Putin’s moneymen, and his wife Anna to get access and information on the Russian leader’s finances. But Anna is a SVR agent and is simultaneously trying to recruit Sia as part of a private operation to find where Putin’s right-hand man, a ruthless man everyone calls Goose, has secreted away hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from Anna’s father. The big question is - who is running who? The game is afoot. No one can be trusted and with the prospect of being tortured and killed in a Russian prison a very real possibility for all involved, is it worth winning the game if the cost is your life?
Reading Moscow X is a full body experience. You sweat, shake, yell and deal with growing paranoia alongside the characters as the ever-increasing danger takes shape and the inevitability of what is going to happen next reveals itself with you powerless to alter the outcome. That’s not to say it’s predictable, which it most certainly is not. There are enough twists and proceedings you don’t expect that will leave you feeling as if you were run over by a truck. Furthermore, the storytelling is immaculate, the characters are perfectly constructed, and the plot is so realistic and audacious that it’ll leave you shellshocked as you turn the pages. It’s a brilliant piece of writing that you won’t be able to easily shake after completion.
Fans of dark, gritty, intense spy novels will fall in love with Moscow X. It’s got all the hallmarks of classic espionage stories with a timeless feel that would work equally well in today’s world or if it had been published during the height of the cold war. And with cinematic storytelling, it’s easy to picture this on the silver screen one day. It’s something else! David McCloskey strikes gold with this book. Do not miss it.
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