The Helsinki Affair Book Review

I will admit that I have very little experience with spy thrillers. However, I felt like this one was lacking in some elements that should make a spy thriller exciting. If I had to pinpoint what makes the story lacking, I would have to say that it was the father-daughter story line. This could have been extremely tumultuous, but it was anticlimactic.

Amanda Cole seems to live an unfulfilling life despite being stationed in Italy. She’s a forty-year-old deputy station chief for a location that is more for leisure than rife with action. So when a Russian man asks to speak to someone at the station, she reluctantly agrees. The man claims to have information about an impending assassination of a U.S. Senator and gives so much detail behind the assassination that Amanda believes him and reports it to the station chief. The station chief doesn’t take the information seriously, but once the assassination happens, he flies both of them to Washington DC to provide a statement.

“Sometimes a sense of outrage grew hot enough to spur the country to action, but most of the time, Americans didn’t bother to expend much energy on dealing with the problems of the rest of the world.”

Aside from our main character being a CIA agent, she comes across as unremarkable at this point. She’s living in Italy and acting like it’s purgatory. It’s not until the setting changes from Italy to Washington DC that we get more insight into her life. I felt like getting to know Amanda happened in layers. It took a while to understand her character and even longer to appreciate her. She definitely comes to life once there’s a mystery to unravel.

In DC, the station chief resigns and Amanda is promoted to take his place. This leaves her in charge of the investigation into the senate’s assassination, which leads her to the senator’s wife and secretary. Knowing that his daughter is poking around the senator’s business, Charlie Cole decides to come clean to her about certain things that could implicate him. This early revelation is anticlimactic, but does open the story to his life and his past. We then go back and forth between Charlie’s past and Amanda’s present.

This back and forth narrative gives us insight into information that Amanda has yet to learn, but is in the process of uncovering. This is where I feel like there should have been a more climactic storyline. Once the truth about Charlie is fully revealed, it feels anticlimactic. There could have been so much more done with this part of the story.

When we’re in the present with Amanda, we’re thrown into her investigation into the conspiracy that the assassinated senator was trying to figure out. She enlists the help of Kath Frost, a legendary spy with a tenured career. While this storyline is interesting and offers some suspense, it’s unclear how this story is connected to Charlie’s story. It definitely uncovers a present problem, but if these two stories have a true connection, they’re very far removed from one another.

In the end we, and Amanda, learn about why the senator was suspicious of Charlie and the conspiracy the senator was trying to uncover is revealed. What happens to Charlie as a result of everything is pretty unsatisfying. Again, I felt like so much more could have been done with the ending of this book.

I ultimately finished the book feeling like it didn’t live up to the hype of the synopsis. Yes, corporate blackmail, covert manipulation, and corrupt oligarchs were all discovered. There was a little bit of action and a little bit of suspense, but I felt like it wasn’t enough for this type of storyline. It had the potential to be explosive, contentious, and full of twists and turns. Instead it was muted, stale, and underwhelming. It was an enjoyable read, but not as “riveting” as the synopsis declares.