Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Black Rose Writing, and Jeffrey Jay Levin for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

If you have ever seen the television show The Americans (which is a pretty good show, by the way), then you have the basic premise of Deep Cover. Harkening back to the Cold War era, the Soviet Union developed hundreds of spies to pose as ordinary Americans who could be activated as needed. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, what happened to all of them? They stayed in the United States, had children, and are somewhat merged into society.

I say “somewhat” because there were special schools these spies sent their children to, and those children were trained as sleeper agents to be activated when needed. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, though, nothing much seemed to come of it, until now.

Stephan Beck is a sergeant assigned to Army Intelligence. He stumbles across a recording from Homeland Security that initially seems to be nothing. However, he’s sure there’s more to it. Working on it even after being told no to, he hears musical notes through the static identical to the school song he heard at his girlfriend’s school reunion. The girlfriend, Lisa Jones, works for a genetics lab and is a brilliant scientist.

What follows is some brilliant intrigue, where the bad guys aren’t who the reader would think. Well, most of us wouldn’t. I had an idea but hoped I was wrong. In fact, I kept waiting for the mea culpa that I was sure was going to be there but never came.

The author states that this book was adapted from a screenplay for a movie he created once upon a time that never saw the light of day. I could see that in several places, particularly the ending. Once I had that in my mind, a lot of things in the book made more sense. Unlike other books I’ve read that seem to scream “movie” this one doesn’t. Throughout most of the story, it read like a decent extension of a Cold War thriller. The children of the former Soviet spies had depth to them and didn’t even know anything about their backgrounds or those of their parents. Lisa, in particular, tries to figure out what’s going on with the missing time and exhaustion she’s been experiencing after making a remarkable scientific breakthrough. That had to be the weakest part of the book for me. It just seemed all too easy to duplicate what happened in the lab after she had worked on this for so long.

However, I did enjoy Deep Cover and can recommend it. It’s a relatively short read at 181 pages, and kept me riveted as to how it was going to end.