Slow Horses meets Red Sparrow in this spy thriller featuring a brilliant young intelligence officer and a troubled heiress who stumble into a global conspiracy that pits present-day Russia against the CIA.

Combining realistic thrills with sophisticated spycraft and witty dialogue, The Collaborators delivers a gut-punch answer to the biggest geopolitical question of our time: how, exactly, did post-Soviet Russia turn down the wrong path?

Crisscrossing the globe on the way to this shocking revelation are disaffected millennial CIA officer Ari Falk, thrown into a moral and professional crisis by the death of his best asset; and brash, troubled LA heiress Maya Chou, spiraling after the disappearance of her Russian American billionaire father. The duo’s adventures take us to both classic and surprising locales—from Berlin, to Latvia, Belarus, and an abandoned technopark outside Moscow.

Dynamic, fast-paced, and filled with captivating details that provide a window into a secretive world, The Collaborators is a first-rate thriller “with a propulsive plot and fantastic twists” (Chris Pavone, author of The Expats) that pays homage to both meanings of “intelligence.”

Light streams through the windows as the espresso machine roars; a gorgeous, rich scent fills the air; and witty conversation unspools over the porcelain cups.
That's the cafe dream. Mark and Nina are about to experience the reality. Determined to re-create the perfect Viennese coffeehouse, they descend on New York's gritty but hip Lower East Side to educate the locals on authentic cafe culture. Soon Mark and Nina are in a downward spiral that will strip them of money, friends, sex life, status, shelter, and, finally, sanity--and offer salvation through something they have never experienced: disaster.
Inspired by the author's own coffeehouse hell, "Ground Up" is a sharp and funny portrait of a New York constantly reinventing itself, and a surprisingly tender story of falling out of love and back in it again.

In this crackling memoir, the journalist and novelist Michael Idov recounts the tempestuous years he spent living alongside - and closely observing - the media and cultural elite of Putin's Russia. After accepting a surprise offer to become the editor in chief of GQ Russia, Idov and his family arrive in a Moscow still seething from a dubious election and the mass anti-Putin rallies that erupted in response. Idov is fascinated by the political turmoil but nonetheless finds himself pulled in unlikely directions. He becomes a tabloid celebrity, acts in a Russian movie with Snoop Dogg, befriends the members of Pussy Riot, punches an anti-Semitic magazine editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre, sells an autobiographical sitcom pilot that is later changed into an anti-American farce, and writes Russia's top-grossing domestic movie of 2015. Meanwhile, he becomes disillusioned with the splintering opposition to Putin and is briefly attracted to a kind of jaded Putinism lite - until Russia's invasion of Ukraine thoroughly changes his mind. In Dressed Up for a Riot, Idov writes openly, sensitively, and stingingly about life in Moscow and his place in a media apparatus that sometimes undermined but more often bolstered a state system defined by cynicism, corruption, and the fanning of fake news. With humour and intelligence, he offers a close-up glimpse of what a declining world power can become.