Dominika Egorova is a ballerina whose career ends with an injury, and her uncle in Russian intelligence gets her into Sparrow School, where the state trains officers in seduction as tradecraft. Her assignment is a young CIA officer in Helsinki running Russia’s most valuable mole. Matthews spent thirty-three years as a CIA operations officer, and the tradecraft is the whole appeal — surveillance detection routes, dead drops, the mechanics of recruiting a person, all of it correct and none of it glamorized. Dominika also has synesthesia and sees people’s intentions as colors, which the whole thing hangs on. Matthews goes overboard on the descriptions of her beautiful ballerina calves — we get it, we get it — but the synesthesia is a clever twist on the spy game.