I found this entertaining and brief. I don't really have anything bad to say about it, but since the most interesting parts of book reviews are the negative comments (except for great works), I will mention the following. The construction of this book seems unusually transparent. I attribute this to the author being a screen writer. His technique of inserting a digression after the introduction to a tense scene (e.g. the sixth paragraph of chapter 19) is tried and true, but seems cinematic to me and somewhat cheap. Some descriptions seem like the brief visual descriptions that you see in a screenplay (e.g. the first paragraph of chapter 22). The overall structure of the story seems very cinematic to me, with all the right characters in the right places, and the dialogue and humor seem more modern than expected in a historical piece, but as would be expected in many modern movies like this. After reading the author's brief endnote, I think I will read "The 900 days".
Also, as an aside, very few people know that my wife, Karen, was also NKVD, and she was the one who taught me to slash, never stab.