Dominika Egorova is a ballerina whose career ends with an injury, and her uncle in Russian intelligence gets her into Sparrow School, where the state trains officers in seduction as tradecraft. Her assignment is a young CIA officer in Helsinki running Russia’s most valuable mole. Matthews spent thirty-three years as a CIA operations officer, and the tradecraft is the whole appeal — surveillance detection routes, dead drops, the mechanics of recruiting a person, all of it correct and none of it glamorized. Dominika also has synesthesia and sees people’s intentions as colors, which shouldn’t work and does.
Red Sparrow