The Spy Book

The point of this heavy-handed farce about the waning days of the Soviet Union will elude most readers. In 1990, KGB operative Nick Boorstin%E2%80%94whose cover is posing as an auto mechanic in Brooklyn, N.Y.%E2%80%94is ordered by his bosses to activate a sleeper agent. That mole, Natalie Kramer, is ordered to enroll in two economics classes taught by University of Virginia professor Eugene Thurston as part of a slow-motion effort to salvage the Soviet economy. The plan, which comes from the mind of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev himself, is for the sultry Kramer to get close to Thurston so that he can figure out how Soviet financial ruin can be avoided. Although Gorbachev himself states that the analysis must be done "immediately," Thurston is never captured and confined until he generates something useful. Instead, Kramer tells him that she wants his help in writing a book on the subject and seduces him. Thurston's battles with his colleagues, who are jockeying to succeed the retiring department head, add little.