I got this book because it just generally sounded good and then I found out that the author, Alma Katsu, usually writes in the occult/horror genre – usually.  This is her debut in the spy genre and appropriate since she has decades of real life experience as an analyst for US intelligence.  What I kind of had in my mind from reading the blurbs was a spy novel with women predominating.  I got that. 

*******
Red Widow
By Alma Katsu
2021
Read by Mozhan Marnó
10h 10m
Rating: A+ / crime – spy  
*******

The Prologue here is a kind of jump start to the book.  A man dies on an airline flight and as it turns out he is a Russian agent.  The book starts and in short order we’re told that the mentor of our protagonist has died suddenly on an airline flight – okay.  Now comes the problem of who killed him and why?  

Lyndsey Duncan is a CIA agent in the Russian division and she has just been transferred back from Beirut where she got in trouble for an illicit romance with an agent from the UK.  Not good.  She needs to redeem herself and her reputation.  There are investigations going on some by the CIA but others by the FBI and something doesn’t feel right.
 
She makes friends with a woman agent whose husband, also an agent, was killed on assignment.  And then it turns out that someone is lying. The thing about Lyndsey is that she is almost, not quite, a human lie detector.     

Suspicion is a huge theme, naturally, along with backstabbing and lethal ambition.  There are lies and lie detection as well as spies and double agents. And there are the sudden and unexpected deaths. That’s just the way it has to be sometimes.  

The narrator, Mozhan Marnò, is perfect.