Description:
For the Kingstons, there is no refuge from the past. No line between family and consequence, no border between legacy and blood.
From Michael Frost Beckner, creator of Spy Game, the Robert Redford/Brad Pitt spy thriller classic, comes Kaleidoscope.
Kaleidoscope is a novel of espionage, family, and American power.
It follows three generations of the Kingstons as their private lives become inseparable from the intelligence state they serve.
No one in the family is left untouched. Spouses, lovers, children. Some innocent. Some not. All victim to the covert project that has shaped this CIA family for decades.
First published in six stages and revised, Kaleidoscope appears here as a single unified novel.
There are other families, neither happy nor mindfully sad; sanctioned to deception, these families kindle their lives with the flint of authorized deceit.
Relentlessly.
Equally.
And to completion.
With the whole of what they should repent classified and unobservable, they are unrepentant. Unredeemed.
The Kingstons of Foxtail Farm are such a family.
"An utterly distinctive voice in spy fiction. Nobody captures the complexity of personal relationships, foreign affairs, and the heartbreak of espionage quite like Beckner."
- I.S. Berry, Edgar Award winner, The Peacock and the Sparrow, former CIA clandestine officer
Duty hardens into doctrine; secrecy becomes a way of life. Love, faith, and moral obligation are tested where truth is never clean and justice cannot survive the institution meant to protect it.
When Michael Kingston vanishes in Turkey, everything the family has managed, concealed, and survived begins to turn. The crisis falls to his sister Lynn, a CIA headquarters officer already at war with grief, duty, and drink. Through her, the structure that has governed the Kingstons' world begins to come undone.
Behind that crisis moves Kolya Yurenev, the Russian spymaster at once rival, mirror, flame, and darkness.
"Michael Frost Beckner captures the essence of spies-the cat-and-mouse choreography of espionage as it is lived, not imagined."
- Tony Mendez, CIA Trailblazer and former Chief of Disguise, and Jonna Mendez, former CIA Chief of Disguise
Since the twentieth century, energy has defined power. Beneath Langley's surface, Silas Kingston's black project KALEIDOSCOPE manipulates global fuel dominance. Older than the Agency itself, it shadows every operation, and for three generations the Kingstons have paid for serving it in loyalty, future, and self.
The novel moves the way its title suggests. Scenes turn, realign across decades as memory and consequence collide: slavery, power, original sin; children reared on Arthurian fairytales whose ideals of justice, love, and sacrifice become both armor and wound, and the voices of the past press steadily into the present.
A saga of espionage, legacy, and the cost of love without truth, Kaleidoscope joins literary ambition to the velocity of the intelligence novel.
"Michael Frost Beckner is the rarest of spy novelists-a beautiful and compelling writer with a mastery of tradecraft and a deep understanding of how espionage really works."
- Joe Weisberg, creator of The Americans