January 2, 2023
Rogue KGB agents plot to assassinate JFK in the confusing third and final volume of Matthews’s Black Sun trilogy (after 2021’s Red Traitor). In September of 1963, Andrei Fyodorov, the former KGB station chief in Miami who recruited Lee Harvey Oswald for the hit, realizes that “the plan was insane” and decides he doesn’t want to go through with it. His efforts to stop it fail. When Kennedy is assassinated, Fyodorov, who fears certain people want to kill him because he knows all the details of the plot, is sent to a Siberian penal colony under an assumed name by the KGB’s General Orlov, who knows Fyodorov can implicate him in the assassination plot. The commandant of the camp, Lt. Col. Alexander Vasin, decides to help Fyodorov in retaliation against his rival, Orlov. Exciting chase scenes across Russia, including through the brutal, unforgiving Siberian countryside, compensate only in part for the surfeit of exposition on the KGB’s internal politics and the lack of characterization. Matthews, who was once a Newsweek bureau chief in Moscow, has a deep, wide-ranging knowledge of the Soviet Union and the era, but his overly dogged attention to detail doesn’t generate a lot of thrills. Even JFK assassination conspiracy buffs will be disappointed. Agent: Toby Mundy, Toby Mundy Assoc.
