While Bill is in Romania, he gets the call that he is needed in the "simple" pickup of a Russian defector, but everything goes awry and it is clear that the KGB/SVR were waiting for them. The pair barely escapes capture, with the help of Bill's politically highly-placed old friend, Aberjan Balzary, and once they are at the American Embassy, it gets really interesting. This snide Russian defector drops the name "Boris," which puts Elliot Ingram, CIA Director of Operations, on high alert. After all, Boris is quite well known in the agency as Bill Heflin's secret KGB asset who provides irrefutable and actionable intel every single time, which facilitated Heflin's meteoric rise in the CIA some years before. He's been radio silent for a while, so this random Russian dropping his name is odd.
Meanwhile, back in New York, the strange happenings continue. As Bill and Catherine are taking their regular walk around the city, they pass by the tree that served as Boris' dead-drop to Heflin for many years and, low and behold, his standard signal for Bill is there on the tree. This is odd because Bill and Catherine know that Boris died of cancer a year or so before, while spending his last few months living at their apartment. What on Earth is going on?
Suffice it to say that Bill will soon learn that not only is someone trying to start Boris' old circle of information and informants back up, but he will learn that there's a mole in the CIA, and as Boris' handler, he is suspect number one. If only he could just say that he knows Boris is dead, but he can't, since Boris revealed before dying just who he was and how connected he was to Bill's family.
Ingram tasks Bill with going back to Bucharest to figure out the identity of the mole and to unravel the latest machinations in the Romanian government, which involve a group of ultra wealthy financial and industrial titans who are slowly taking over all aspects of government-run industry - the oligarchs. In the midst of all of this, Bill will find himself delving deeper into his own past and that of his beloved gypsy wet nurse, Tanti Bobo, who was banished by her own clan and had a son that went missing.
His investigations into these various things will unveil even more about his past, as well as those close to him, and will expose the depravity of Nicu Ceausescu, the son of Romania's former leader. Bill will have to stay on his toes if he hopes to survive this without finding his only escape a frigid relocation to Russia, and when the mole goes after Catherine and baby Jack, it ratchets up the stakes considerably.
I enjoyed The Bucharest Legacy, but not as much as I did the first book, The Bucharest Dossier. In the previous story, things definitely fell into Bill's lap and a lot of coincidences certainly worked out in his favor. It was charming, if a bit unbelievable that a CIA analyst could handle himself so well being thrown into the role of a field agent being hunted by multiple agencies. However, the coincidences continue to happen in this book and a lot of the incidents just felt a little too coincidental and unbelievable. While it's still an enjoyable espionage romp, it's just not quite as riveting as the first, although I did like finding out the answers to the lingering questions of Bill's past.
