OUR WOMAN IN MOSCOW

Twin sisters find themselves caught up in a Russian spy ring at the height of the Cold War.

In 1952, Ruth Macallister, a former fashion model and the power behind the throne at a Manhattan modeling agency, receives a postcard from her twin sister, Iris Digby—sent from Moscow. When FBI man and former Yale fullback Sumner Fox comes sniffing around, Ruth at first withholds this information, but later the two will team up, pretending to be newlyweds, to go to Moscow with the intent of extracting Iris from the clutches of the Stalin regime. Or at least that’s Ruth’s intent—Sumner’s mixed motives are a source of more confusion than intrigue. The 1952 sections, narrated by Ruth, alternate with Iris’ story, set in 1948 Great Britain, detailing how her marriage is foundering. She always knew her husband, Sasha Digby, was a spy for the Russians, a mole embedded in the U.S. diplomatic corps. Lately, however, his drunkenness appears to have rendered him all but useless to his handlers. Iris met Sasha during the sisters’ prewar Roman holiday in 1940 and, infatuated, married him in haste. Sasha’s frequent all-night benders have definitely debloomed the rose. The 1948 narrative slows down the present action without really adding much crucial insight into how, or why, Sasha and Iris end up defecting, with their children, to Moscow or even why, after his poor performance, Moscow would want him. Making occasional appearances in the 1952 timeline is Lyudmila Ivanova, a tough-as-nails KGB operative and a single mother due to her informing on her husband, who was sent to the gulag. He’s not the only family member she’s turned in. Lyudmila has been assigned to monitor expat defectors like Sasha. Iris is the most fully developed and sympathetic character here. Ruth is another iteration of the wisecracking dame who has appeared in so many Williams novels, and Lyudmila seems patterned after Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, except that this doctrinaire minion of Stalin wouldn’t be caught dead in a rom-com.

A cumbersome plot weighs down this would-be spy thriller.