The Silent Sisters: 3 (Charles Jenkins)

The Silent Sisters is the third book in the Charles Jenkins series by American author, Robert Dugoni. When the CIA becomes aware of a Kremlin program to expose the remaining two of the Seven Sisters, and the women go silent, they decide to send Charles Jenkins in to ascertain if the women need to be exfiltrated from Moscow, or have turned.

It's dangerous for Charlie: he's on a Kremlin kill list, and his wife isn't happy that he is going to risk his life yet again, but he managed to extract a woman from the notorious Lefortovo prison, so if the women will trust anyone, it will be him. The CIA upskills him in tech and devices and equips him with disguises and the necessary papers, and he enters Moscow very much under the radar.

But before he can even connect with either woman, his deeply-ingrained sense of human decency gets in the way of his common sense, a Mafiya son is shot dead, and Charlie is soon being sought by Police, a Mafiya Godmother and Russia's FSB. By the time he is ready to extract the seventh sister, they have a ruthless assassin on their trail.

When Arkhip Mishkin, a Senior Investigator with the Department of Criminal Investigations due for retirement is called to a shooting at a dive bar, he's not phased by the status of the victim, and determined to close his last case and maintain his perfect record, whatever it takes. There's not much else to interest him now he's a widower.

But then the CCTV footage of the shooting is wiped and Akhip, having seen the body, knows the Medical Examiner's report is a fabrication: the bystander did not kill Eldar Velikaya. When the bystander's prints turn up a surprise, he concludes something more complicated is going on. But Arkhip can't rest until he tracks down this Charles Jenkins to get the truth. If that means a train trip to Vladivostok, so be it.

As the prologue indicates, all does not go as planned and Charlie is subjected to quite a beating in the Irkutsk Meat Market. But he does have some very able people in his corner, and not just the CIA. Once they locate Charlie, they set up a neat sting that seems to satisfy all concerned, except a certain deputy director who has been gunning for Charlie from the start.

Dugoni manages to include a nail-biting chase through Moscow tunnels, numerous disguises, clever switches and a rather grisly revenge that will probably put some readers off eating sausages. Senior Investigator Arkhip Mishkin is an utter delight, and there's plenty of black humour in the action-packed final book of this brilliant spy trilogy.

This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer.