The Silent Sisters

Bestseller Dugoni’s electrifying third espionage thriller featuring CIA agent Charles Jenkins (after 2020’s The Last Agent) opens with Jenkins hanging from a hook in a meat market in Irkutsk, Russia, where his interrogators are threatening to put him through a meat grinder. Flashbacks reveal how he got there. In recent years, Jenkins has been part of a CIA operation involving seven Russian women who were raised to be American spies. Five of the so-called sisters have by now been killed or exfiltrated, and the CIA dispatches Jenkins to Russia to rescue the remaining pair. On his first night in Moscow, Jenkins goes to a bar, where he sees two men mistreating a woman. He confronts the men outside in an alley, and in the ensuing fracas one of the two ends up dead. The now compromised Jenkins goes on the run, the target of a senior Russian investigator, the Russian mafia, and the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency. Many riveting, hairbreadth escapes follow as he remains intent on accomplishing his mission. This entry works as a standalone, but newcomers will scramble to read the earlier books. Agent: Meg Ruley, Jane Rotrosen Agency. (Feb.)