The Other Woman was published by Harper in 2018. A Russian intelligence officer attempts to defect in Vienna but is assassinated before he can complete the crossing. His dying words suggest that a senior figure in Western intelligence is a long-term Russian agent — a mole planted decades ago by the KGB, still active, still transmitting. Allon’s investigation traces the penetration back to the Cold War, to a legendary KGB spymaster named Sergei Morosov, and to a secret that connects Russian intelligence to the highest levels of British political life.
The novel is Silva’s homage to John le Carré and the tradition of the mole hunt — Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy transposed to the post-Cold War era. The central question (can old Cold War penetrations still be active, decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse?) is not merely academic: the novel argues that Russian intelligence never stopped running its agents, merely rebranded the operation.
The Cambridge Five Legacy
The novel explicitly draws on the history of the Cambridge Five — Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, and Cairncross — the British intelligence officers recruited by Soviet intelligence at Cambridge University in the 1930s. Silva’s fictional mole follows the same template: recruited young, ideologically committed, patient enough to spend decades working their way into positions of maximum access. The novel suggests that the Cambridge Five model was not a one-off but a template that Soviet (and later Russian) intelligence applied repeatedly.
The Le Carré Homage
Silva has been open about his admiration for John le Carré, and The Other Woman is his most direct engagement with le Carré’s territory — the institutional betrayal, the exhaustive investigation, the moral ambiguity of intelligence work. Where le Carré’s mole hunts are melancholy and bureaucratic, Silva’s is propulsive and violent, but the underlying question is the same: what does it mean to discover that the person you trusted most has been working for the enemy all along?
Collecting The Other Woman
First edition (Harper, New York, 2018): Boards with dust jacket.
Approximate market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $15–$30
- Signed first edition: $40–$120
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest. Signed copies should reach $80–$250.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this the best Allon novel? Many fans consider it the best of the later entries, and it frequently appears on “best of the series” lists alongside The English Assassin and A Death in Vienna. The mole-hunt structure gives it a tautness that some of the more sprawling geopolitical thrillers lack.
Is Sergei Morosov based on a real person? Not directly, though the character combines elements of several known KGB spymasters, particularly Yuri Modin (who ran the Cambridge Five) and Markus Wolf of the East German Stasi.