As mentioned on the blog last month, on September 19, 2017, St Martin’s Press will publish my agency client Amy Knight’s new book Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder.  To date, we have received these five blurbs

1) “Amy Knight is our foremost expert on Russian spycraft. This incisive, deeply researched account of the Kremlin’s murderous dark arts should
be an electrifying wake-up call to the West about the danger we face from Putin’s gangster state.” —Edward Lucas, Senior editor, The Economist

2) “Amy Knight’s Orders to Kill builds a compelling case against the Putin regime for its complicity in the violent deaths of many of its critics—political opponents, muckraking journalists, and reform advocates. It also destroys the myth that we in the West can appease Putin to get him to behave himself.”—Bill Browder, author of Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

3) “A brave and important book. Amy Knight has an expert understanding of Russia, its spy agencies, and the dark state created by Vladimir Putin and his KGB cronies. Putin’s critics have an uncanny habit of falling dead and Knight tells this story with rare skill. Compelling.”—Luke Harding, author of A Very Expensive Poison: The Murder of Alexander Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West 

4) “Putin’s regime kills. It goes after its enemies at home and abroad and has created the environment in which powerful figures close to the Kremlin can also prosecute their own feuds with impunity. In this powerful and detailed account, Amy Knight tackles a series of individual and collective killings and amasses the evidence, some clear, some circumstantial, connecting them with the Kremlin. Whether you agree or disagree with any of the specific findings, having read this book it is impossible to question the extent to which the Kremlin is not just a kleptocracy, it is a ruthless one, at that.”—Mark Galeotti, author of Vory: The Story of Russian Organized Crime 

5) “Orders to Kill focuses unblinkingly on the grim but necessary topic of political murder during the seventeen year Putin period. Amy Knight is a meticulous analyst and is consistently balanced in her judgments. The two chapters on the poisoning through radioactive polonium of former KGB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko in London break significant new ground.  Knight demonstrates that the order to commit a number of the political killings she discusses can, with great likelihood, be traced back to President Putin himself or to his powerful Chechen Gauleiter Ramzan Kadyrov.”—John B. Dunlop, author of The Moscow Bombings of September 1999 

The photo below, with Putin and Chechen president Kadyrov, is one of more than a dozen pictures in the book. Pre-orders for the book can be placed via this link.