The Kobalt Dossier

April 5, 2021
At the start of bestseller Lustbader’s exciting sequel to 2020’s The Nemesis Manifesto, Evan Ryder, a former field agent for a now dismantled intelligence unit funded by the Department of Defense, learns that her sister, Bobbi Fisher, who Evan thinks was murdered three years earlier, was a traitor working for Russian intelligence. Bobbi’s children, nine-year-old Michael and 11-year-old Wendy, have gone missing, but before Evan and partner Ben Butler, who’s her former boss, can begin looking for them, Evan is briefly abducted. Meanwhile in Russia, Bobbi, who works for an ultra-secret SVR group, is ordered to continue to try to infiltrate a religious cult, even though she previously failed to identify the cult’s leader and the location of its home base. The narrative shifts between Bobbi and Evan, with interludes provided by various Russian politicians, spymasters, and Michael and Wendy. Lustbader does a fine job building suspense as he gradually reveals the complicated connections among the various players. This is a masterly performance by an author who’s still fresh and original after a long career in a genre he helped define. Agent: Mitch Hoffman, Aaron M. Priest Literary.