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After taking down a gang boss in the murderous streets of Baltimore almost single-handedly, FBI agent Kay Molloy is transferred to Russian counterintelligence in New York City. She begins to learn the ropes: the endless hours of staring at the matrix – the massive FBI database, the cold treatment by her boss, Susan Jeffries, dubbed Frowny by her colleagues, and the hours of surveillance.
Kay is warned by her boss to get a hobby, that counterintelligence is a marathon, not a sprint, and the job will eat you up. Frowny's hobby, it turns out, is paintball. Kay has nothing but her work, and her family – her aimless brother and her godparents who raised them after Kay's parents were assassinated in Columbia twelve years earlier.
It does not take long for the boys on the other side to spot Kay's weakness. Meanwhile Kay is assigned to Black Bear. The CIA has recently lost three double agents in Russia and now suspects there is a mole in their Washington headquarters. With the help of the FBI and its internal focus, they hope to bring this mole to ground.
Jan Fedarcyk knows her stuff, having served as Assistant Director in charge of the FBI's New York office for 25 years. Like baseball, she knows there are more outs than hits. Poor Kay is party to several outs and when she loses the possible "asset" who is grabbed by the other side right in front of her eyes, she wonders when the hits will come.
This is Fedarcyk's first novel. She does an excellent job of weaving a number of very complicated plots into the narrative, while keeping them clear in the reader's mind. She understands the psychology of turncoats well - not altogether bad people, but weak and exploited by those who understand weakness. She understands the long game, as the KGB morphs into the SVR, as the USSR morphs into present day Russia.
There are moments in the novel that don't ring true. How can Kay's relationship with Andrew, the CIA blue-flamer end simply because he is moved back to Washington? And neither seems upset by this. Of course, Andrew is something of a mystery and I suspect that he will return in the next Kay Molloy novel. After all, Fidelity, the title, is also the first of the three words in the FBI motto. Certainly a setup for at least two more stories with Kay, I hope.
FIDELITY ends with a very satisfying bang-up turning of the tables, as Tom, the Russian illegal, discovers he's not as smart as he thought he was. But true to Frowny's belief that "counterintelligence is a game in which the field, the players, even the outcome, never becomes entirely clear," even the reader is not sure what just happened.
Let us hope Fedarcyk returns with Bravery and Integrity, the other parts of the FBI motto.
§ Susan Hoover is a playwright, independent producer and retired college English teacher. She lives in Nova Scotia.
Reviewed by Susan Hoover, October 2016
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