The Starlings of Bucharest is the story of a young Englishman attempting to navigate the treacherous waters of Eastern Europe in the mid 1970’s. As an aspiring journalist and sliding into debt, Ted Walker is sent to Bucharest to interview a famous film director, but suspects the man he sees is an imposter. His guide, Vasile, has involved him in a more interesting story regarding a missing girl, a puzzle which Ted aims to solve while he's in Moscow at the International Film Festival. But, unbeknownst to him, Ted is at risk of falling into a dangerous trap that could change his life forever.
This fantastic, fiendishly clever and intelligent novel (the second in the Moscow Wolves series, the first being the Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, which I highly recommend!) takes the reader into the murky world of espionage and counter-espionage so prevalent during the final years of the Cold War. Sarah Armstrong has created a wonderfully atmospheric story, full of intrigue and creeping dread and packed within its pages a not only a wealth of historical detail, (the decay of 1970's London and the sinister brilliance with which the security services fished for recruits for example) but, like those spy masters before, Le Carre and Graham Greene (and I truly believe this novel to be right up there with the greats) has created complex and fully developed characters that fly off the page.
The Starling of Bucharest is one of the most intelligent espionage novels I have read, and I certainly can’t wait for the next book in the Moscow Wolves series!