An Honorable Man
Washington DC, 1953. The Cold War is heating up; McCarthyism, in all its fear and demagoguery, is raging in the nation’s capital, and Joseph Stalin’s death has left a dangerous power vacuum in the Soviet Union.
The CIA, meanwhile, is reeling from the discovery of a double agent within their midst. Someone is selling secrets to the Soviets, compromising missions and endangering lives around the globe. The CIA director knows any news of the traitor, whose code name is Protocol, would be a national embarrassment and weaken the entire agency. He assembles an elite team to find Protocol.
George Mueller seems to be the perfect man to help the investigation: Yale-educated; extensive experience running missions in Eastern Europe; an operative so dedicated to his job that it left his marriage in tatters. Mueller, though, has secrets of his own, and as he digs deeper into the case, making contact with a Soviet agent, suspicion begins to fall on him, as well. Paranoia and fear spreads and until Protocol is found, no one can be trusted.
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Paul Vidich
PAUL VIDICH’S seventh novel, The Poet’s Game, A Spy in Moscow, is forthcoming from Pegasus Books in May 2025. His previous novel, Beirut Station, was selected by CrimeReads as one of the best espionage novels of 2023. His debut novel, An Honorable Man, published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, was selected by Publisher’s Weekly as a Top 10 Mystery and Thriller in 2016. It was followed by The Good Assassin, also published by Simon and Schuster. His third novel, The Coldest Warrior, was widely praised in England and America, earning strong reviews from The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. It was shortlisted for the UK’s Staunch Prize and chosen as a Notable Selection of 2020 by CrimeReads. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, LitHub, CrimeReads, Fugue, The Nation, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. Junot Diaz selected his story “Jump Shot” as a winner of the 2010 Fugue Short Story Contest and his story “Falling Girl,” was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize and appeared in New Rivers Press’ American Fiction, Volume 12: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers. His story collection was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Vidich received his MFA from Rutgers-Newark, and he was a co-founder and editor of Storyville. He lives in lower Manhattan.
George Mueller
George Mueller consists of two books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
