First published by HarperCollins in Great Britain in 2026; published by One More Chapter on May 7, 2026
The Last Flight from Moscow is a flawed spy novel set in 1959. The story is narrated by Mae Pierce, a 34-year-old woman who spied for OSS during World War II. Her former partner in espionage, Sutton Maxfield, now works for the CIA.
While in the OSS, Mae was captured by the Germans. Sutton rescued her with an assist from Vera, a Russian spy. That anecdote is at the heart of the novel’s theme, which amounts to “no woman left behind.”
Sutton has long been retired. She seems to have had trouble adjusting to conventional life. She plays the numbers, relying on a supposed ability to forsee the winning numbers in advance. Her winnings are sporadic and she's deeply in debt to a criminal organization that will do her harm if she doesn't pay.
With that setup, the rest of the story follows a predictable path. Sutton recruits Mae to travel to Moscow to perform a mission, promising to pay her enough to erase her debt. The US is showcasing the American way of life by building a modern home in Moscow, complete with miracle appliances. The Americans are providing guides (actually models) to demonstrate how dutiful American wives operate fancy stoves.
The mission is to save Khruschev. The CIA has tumbled onto a scheme to assassinate him when he attends the exhibition. Sutton wants Mae and a young “girl spy,” Elaine Holiday, to pose as exhibition guides and keep an eye out for clues to the assassin’s identity. Lacking confidence in girl spies, the CIA has assigned male agents (posing as electricians and such) to do the heavy lifting. Mae and Elaine will be supervised in Russia by CIA Agent Hayden Quaid.
Sutton asks Mae to train Elaine, although Mae provides little in the way of training as the story progresses. In fact, it wasn’t clear to me that Mae had any training of her own, apart from being told not to be photographed while spying.
In Moscow, Mae discovers that Vera is a chaperone at the exhibition. Vera was a Stalinist when they joined forces to fight the Germans but she might now be working for Khruschev or the Russian mafia. Whether Vera is still loyal to her buddies in the OSS or is now a villain should probably be a key plot point, but Andie Newton’s clumsy handling of the question robs it of any interest. Newton attempts to misdirect the reader as to both Vera's loyalty and the assassin's identity but the reveals are far from surpising.
We know from history that Khrushchev was not assassinated, but the plot suggests that he would have been ridiculously easy to kill, but for the intervention of the CIA. The assassination plot wraps up with about a third of the novel remaining. Mae returns to the US but Elaine doesn’t.
The rest of the story involves Mae's determination not to leave Elaine behind. Mae's rescue plan depends on her haphazard ability to see numbers before they are revealed. I’m not sure that witchcraft has any place in a serious spy novel, but The Last Flight from Moscow doesn’t tell a serious story.
Mae is addicted to vodka, gambling, and sex, making her a more modern woman than the other guides, including Darla, who proudly represents Pepsi in its efforts to break into the Russian soft drink market. Like Linda Lou and Suzanne and Karen and the other American women, Darla is built on a stereotype. The women show little that might count as believable personalities.
Newton failed to convince me that the book tells a plausible story. Mae repeatedly sneaks out at night, breaking curfew and crossing boundaries into the forbidden parts of Moscow. The American embassy notices but the Russians never seem to spot her. For a seasoned spy, Mae’s tradecraft is nearly nonexistent. She has sensitive conversations with Elaine in their hotel rooms, apparently unaware that well before the 1950s, Russians began bugging hotel rooms where Americans stayed. Yet the Russians never tumble to the fact that Mae is a spy.
There are too many scenes in which Mae describes the butterflies in her stomach when she sees the “dreamy” Quaid, or imagines bedding him before she actually does. Having sex and falling in love with the wrong person is a staple of spy fiction, but dreamy men giving rise to butterflied stomachs is in a different category altogether. Infecting a spy novel with the tropes of a romance novel might be a good formula for fans of romance fiction, so you might like The Last Flight from Moscow if that’s what you’re looking for. Be prepared for dialog like “Shut up and kiss me, damn it.” I was annoyed by those scenes, although I admired Mae’s progressive (for pre-feminist times) approach to coping with horniness.
Mae spends more time obsessing about her Japanese nightgown (she loans it to another model in exchange for a favor) than she devotes to catching the assassin. There are far too many scenes of women discussing fashion, complete with detailed descriptions of hairstyles and shoes. Fashion-conscious readers who wonder what women were wearing in 1959 might be thrilled by this content. I thought it was boring filler that serves only to increase the word count.
In fact, the entire novel is too boring to qualify as a thriller. Nor does it develop the kind of intrigue I desire from a spy novel. Some readers will appreciate the novel’s message of female empowerment in pre-feminist times. To those readers, I give the novel a guarded recommendation. For other spy novel fans, there are better choices on the market.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS