Mike Ramsdell

Okay, not great.

This book starts out better than it ends. It gets way too religious for my taste when you're about half-way through. But the beginning part about his get-away from the Russian mob and his quest to find food in a tiny village where he is stuck for 4 days was pretty good reading.

This book fascinated me--it's a very interesting look into the experiences of an American involved in a top secret mission in Siberia at the end of the Cold War. The book is mostly true, but the author says he had to change some things and classify the book as fiction for reasons of security. I almost gave the book 3 stars because it could have been edited better and a few parts are a bit sentimental, but the story more than makes up for the shortcomings.

It is more of a history lesson of America versus the Soviet Union in the early 1990's. The story wanders all over the place and flashes back at will.

A fast read but as spy novel... it does not cut the mustard