Who Shot Freddie?

It’s a long—but absorbing—story: Who murdered our dashing Freddie Woodruff (think James Bond)? The CIA station chief took a single bullet to the head near the end of his time in Tbilisi, Georgia, the former Soviet republic recently menaced by Putin’s tanks. Thriller writers despaired that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they’d lost a convenient villain but Andrew Higgins’ reconstruction of the murder suggests villainy is back in business. The cast has a glamorous barmaid, a veteran Soviet security officer, his terrified girlfriend—and a drunken bum who says, from his prison cell, he was framed for a professional killing he couldn’t have done.