The Terminal Spy

Praise

“Absorbing.”—The New York Times
 
“Meticulous reporting . . . Cowell plays out the Byzantine possibilities behind this killing with heroic clarity . . . The Terminal Spy is not simply a wholly engrossing and thought-provoking story of espionage and homicide.”—Los Angeles Times

“Doggedly reported and dramatically written . . . Cowell tells the story with literary panache but doesn’t let his stylish prose eclipse the substance of a sordid tale. The sections about espionage and the assassination are worthy of Tom Clancy, but the author’s political analysis is equally riveting. . . . A well-told true-crime tale mixed with expert political/historical analysis.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Reads like a thriller. But The Terminal Spy is a chilling and horrific true story. Alan Cowell has done a brilliant job of investigative reporting.”—David Wise, author of Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America

“Compulsively researched and sourced.”—The Guardian (London)
 
“In The Terminal Spy Alan Cowell, a top-flight investigative journalist, digs deep into today’s brutal Russia to find a new Soviet Union waiting to be born. Or maybe it never went away.”—Alan Furst, author of The Spies of Warsaw
 
“Alan Cowell has used a veteran journalist’s skill to lead us through the roads of deceit and brutality and has exposed the vicious retribution of Russia’s security apparatus against the former KGB officer who dared to condemn Putin’s modern Russia, and paid for it with his life. This is a story of the real world in which we live—brilliantly told—and chilling in its implications. The Terminal Spy should be read by everyone seeking an insight to today’s Moscow.”—Gerald Seymour

“The cast of characters is astonishing and so complex that the author felt compelled to list them all in a who’s who at the beginning, and you’ll be glad he did. Complementing this outré ensemble is a Byzantine story line that could have dissolved easily into a hopeless stew in less adroit hands, but Cowell, the New York Times’ former London bureau chief and an investigative reporter, knows the story inside out. And he writes exceedingly well.”—Star Tribune

“A brilliant, subtle book . . . a fascinating account which tells us much about the people involved, and even more by inference of the world they inhabit and the society which created them.”—Anthony Robinson, former Moscow bureau chief, Financial Times