The Manager

Spies in the Adirondacks. Lake Placid, 1982. Backcountry editor Walter Loving picks up a top-coated hitchhiker in the snow outside the Casa del Sol restaurant two years after the Soviet loss to the U.S. in the "Miracle on Ice" Winter Olympic hockey game. The hitchhiker tells Walter he is the "manager" of a visiting Red Army B-team, whose players have kicked him out of the van.

But the manager is really a spy obsessed with restoring Soviet dominance in ice sports. His lover is a spectacular Olympic figure skater fond of quoting the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Together they invade and complicate Walter's life in ways that test his reserves of courage and resourcefulness, with far reaching effects.

The Manager isn't a typical spy novel, though lines are crossed at great risk and the stakes are high. The narrative moves rapidly to Montreal, Siberia, Sarajevo, and back again to the Adirondacks. Supporting characters include environmental activists, woodsmen, and a wisecracking journalist, Sally, who is one of Walter's former girlfriends. Satirical, irreverent, earthy, The Manager is above all a novel of the Adirondacks, a novel of relationships, and of love and its varieties.