Red Sparrow

Dominika Egorova, a ballerina whose career ends in injury, is recruited by her uncle into Russian intelligence and sent to a school that trains officers in sexual technique as an operational tool.

She is assigned to Nathaniel Nash, a young CIA officer who is handling a senior Russian asset, and the operation becomes a long mutual approach.

A trained seductress and the officer she is sent to compromise, each aware of what the other is.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Matthews served thirty-three years in the CIA's operations directorate, and the tradecraft is the novel's principal claim: surveillance detection routes, dead drops, agent handling, polygraph technique, internal vetting.

The procedural material is more detailed and more credible than in almost anything else in this section.

The novel's best material concerns the relationship between a case officer and a source: the management of risk, the psychology of someone betraying their own service, and the specific obligations that accumulate.

Matthews is writing about something he did, and the difference from researched fiction is noticeable.

The training in sexual manipulation is depicted in detail and the novel treats it as a documented historical practice.

The material is explicit and is the book's most criticised element, both for its accuracy and for the amount of attention it receives relative to its plot function.

She has synaesthesia, perceiving people's intentions as colours, which is an odd choice that functions as an externalised instinct.

She is given genuine agency and her eventual decisions are her own rather than the plot's, which is more than the setup promises. Matthews also gives her a mother to protect and a service that has used her family badly, which supplies motive independent of the romance.

The novel depicts the intelligence service as an instrument of personal power rather than of state policy, with Putin appearing as a character.

The political portrait is specific and unflattering and has aged into something more obviously accurate than it appeared at publication. The novel also depicts the internal culture of the service — the vetting, the denunciations, the careerism — with the same specificity as the tradecraft.

Each chapter ends with a recipe for a dish mentioned in it, which is an extremely unusual device for a spy novel.

It is either charming or baffling depending on the reader, and Matthews maintained it across the trilogy. They also tend to appear after chapters containing violence, which produces a tonal collision that readers have described as both jarring and oddly effective.

Functional and occasionally clumsy, particularly in the sexual material, which several reviewers have identified as the book's weakest writing.

Matthews's strengths are procedural rather than stylistic, and the novel is worth reading for what he knows rather than for how he writes it. The interior monologue in particular is frequently clumsy, and Matthews is considerably better at describing an operation than at describing a feeling.

There is torture, described clinically and at length, and the treatment of captured officers is graphic.

The material is consistent with the book's realism and is genuinely unpleasant, and readers should expect it rather than be surprised. Matthews also declines to make the torturers exceptional, presenting them as officers carrying out a procedure, which is consistent with the book's general realism.

Two sequels follow and complete the arc, and the tradecraft remains the principal attraction throughout.

The later books are somewhat better written and less reliant on the sexual material, and readers who get through the first generally continue. Matthews died in 2021, so the trilogy is complete and there will be no further books, which at least means readers can commit to it safely.

A 2018 adaptation follows the plot loosely and foregrounds the training sequences.

The tradecraft that justifies the novel is largely absent from the film, which leaves it with the elements most open to objection and few of the compensations. The adaptation also removes the recipes entirely, which is understandable and removes one of the few genuinely distinctive things about the source.

Readers who want genuine operational detail from someone who did the work, and who can tolerate explicit content and uneven prose.

It is the most technically authoritative spy novel in this section and is not the best written. Readers who want both should read le Carré and accept less procedural specificity.