Odesa at Dawn

Ex-CIA man Max Rushmore travels to a still-peaceful Odesa on routine assignment. But things veer off course when the severed hand of the local governor shows up in a vat of sunflower oil. Max stumbles across a solitary toe, with the same tell-tale markings. The downsized professional can-t help himself - he has to investigate.
With the Russian threat in the background, Max-s quest takes him down to the crumbling underbelly of the beautiful Black Sea port city, once the Russian Empire-s glittering third capital. It leads him to dubious businessmen, corrupt officials, catacomb dwellers, scientists, pastry-chefs, poets, archivists, cops - and killers.
As global political tensions rise, Max begins to untangle the threads of the case. But he is also being tracked - and not just by Odesäs network of mafia-minded stray cats, who may be the only ones who really know what-s going on. In this surreal contemporary spin on the classic spy thriller, Sally McGrane pays tribute to one-time Odesa residents like Babel, Gogol, Pushkin and Chekhov, and to the city itself, creating a darkly witty, beguiling and bizarre work of fiction like nothing before.
Tokarczuk meets Bulgakov meets Le Carré, in this affectionate portrait of a complex and fascinating city

Sally McGrane is a Berlin-based writer and freelance journalist for The New York Times, the New Yorker magazine, and others. Originally from San Francisco, she has worked as a journalist in Russia and Ukraine. She wrote "Odesa at Dawn", her second spy novel, in Odesa.