Cover Story - Hardcover

Cullen, Robert

3.31

13 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689121989 ISBN 13: 9780689121982

Publisher: Scribner, 1994

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Colin Burke, Moscow correspondent for an American magazine, finds himself caught up in the total disarray and corruption lying at the heart of the crumbling Soviet Union. By the author of Soviet Sources.

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From the Inside Flap:

ING...RELENTLESS...A LABYRINTH OF INTRIGUE."
--People
Journalist Colin Burke has seen it all. "I'm insensitive," he says, "It has its advantages." But his famed cynicism is put to the test in Moscow when Burke, who is covering the Middle East peace talks, receives a hot tip from a mysterious, seductive Israeli operative. But she expects a lot more in return.
Burke begins to uncover a harrowing story involving Syria and Russian nuclear scientists. Now foreign agents of every stripe want his intelligence, forcing Burke to plunge into the black-market underground, a byzantine world where the only person you can trust will be the first to betray you....
"Complex, convincing and thoroughly unpredictable...Cullen's carefully crafted thriller partakes of both the spy novel and the detective genre....His evocation of the evil empire in ruins during the muddy Russian spring is remarkable. The sense of place is uncanny, the atmosphere of paranoia worthy of K

From Kirkus Reviews:

While covering the stalled Arab-Israeli peace talks in Moscow, an American reporter learns that the Syrians are trying to recruit nuclear scientists from a tottering post-Soviet Russia. Former Newsweek correspondent Cullen (Twilight of Empire, 1991) brings the novel of international intrigue brilliantly up to date. American Weekly bureau chief Colin Burke hasn't filed a cover story in ages and is under a lot of pressure from New York. When he's approached (and seduced) by a sexy Israeli operative, she tips him off that a shadowy Arab named Kassim is using an oil company called Switsico as a front for Syria's president, Hafez el-Assad; Ethan Worthington, the US Embassy science officer, confirms the suspicions about Kassim. When Burke gets yet another tip--this time from the voluptuous Katya, a young prostitute working for Kassim- -the trail leads to the forbidden, ``secret'' industrial city of Nauchny Gorodok. There he gets an exclusive interview with a physicist named Nekronov who claims he's been offered a half- million dollars per year to help develop the bomb for Syria. Burke is ready to file, but New York wants photos. So he has to sneak back into the city. This time he's accompanied by Plotnikov, a clownish mathematician who says he wants to learn journalism. They're arrested shortly after Plotnikov makes a mysterious phone call. Burke is warned off the story by Russian security police. He begins to suspect a setup, that Nekronov may in fact be a ringer used by the Israelis to discredit Assad. Or is it a ploy by former KGB agents clinging to the last strands of power? When he finds Katya with her throat slit, and when the beautiful Israeli agent is shot before his eyes, Burke realizes that sometimes things are, indeed, what they seem. A smashing mix of suspense, sex, humor, danger, and cynicism. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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