White Fox
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A page-turning thriller about two competing KGB operatives on a race across Russia and against time to uncover the devastating truth behind the assassination of JFK.
1963. In a desolate Russian penal colony, the radio blares the news of President Kennedy’s death. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin’s new post as director of a gulag camp in the middle of a frozen tundra is far from a promotion. This is where disgraced agents, like Vasin, are sent to disappear and die quietly. But when tensions in the camp mount and a violent revolt breaks out, Vasin finds himself on the run with a mysterious prisoner holding the most dangerous secret in the world: who ordered the murder of President Kennedy.
In a breathless chase that leads them throughout the Soviet Union, from the barren Siberian wastelands, to the stunning halls of the Catherine Palace, and into the gritty streets of Leningrad and Moscow, Vasin must stay one step ahead of the deadliest spy and police organizations in the world, and keep the most wanted man in Russia alive. The journey will push Vasin’s loyalty, morality, and patriotism to the limit, until he faces the ultimate choice: fall in line, or die fighting the system.
With masterly storytelling that weaves together a moment of explosive history with the cutthroat machinations of Soviet politics, Owen Matthews’s White Fox captures the paradigm-shifting assassination from a unique Soviet point of view. This is a page-turning thriller across Russia, where characters facing impossible odds are forced to decide among truth, justice, and all-out war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rogue KGB agents plot to assassinate JFK in the confusing third and final volume of Matthews's Black Sun trilogy (after 2021's Red Traitor). In September of 1963, Andrei Fyodorov, the former KGB station chief in Miami who recruited Lee Harvey Oswald for the hit, realizes that "the plan was insane" and decides he doesn't want to go through with it. His efforts to stop it fail. When Kennedy is assassinated, Fyodorov, who fears certain people want to kill him because he knows all the details of the plot, is sent to a Siberian penal colony under an assumed name by the KGB's General Orlov, who knows Fyodorov can implicate him in the assassination plot. The commandant of the camp, Lt. Col. Alexander Vasin, decides to help Fyodorov in retaliation against his rival, Orlov. Exciting chase scenes across Russia, including through the brutal, unforgiving Siberian countryside, compensate only in part for the surfeit of exposition on the KGB's internal politics and the lack of characterization. Matthews, who was once a Newsweek bureau chief in Moscow, has a deep, wide-ranging knowledge of the Soviet Union and the era, but his overly dogged attention to detail doesn't generate a lot of thrills. Even JFK assassination conspiracy buffs will be disappointed.
