For half a century, the case of Isaiah Oggins, a 1920s New York intellectual brutally murdered in 1947 on Stalin’s orders, remained hidden in the secret files of the KGB and the FBI – a footnote buried in the rubble of the Cold War. Then, in 1992, it surfaced briefly, when Boris Yeltsin handed over a deeply censored dossier to the White House. ‘The Lost Spy’ at last reveals the truth: Oggins was one of the first Americans to spy for the Soviets.

Based on six years of international sleuthing, ‘The Lost Spy’ traces Oggins’s rise in beguiling detail – a brilliant Columbia University graduate sent to run a safe house in Berlin and spy on the Romanovs in Paris and the Japanese in Manchuria – and his fall: death by poisoning in a KGB laboratory. As harrowing as ‘Darkness at Noon’ and as tragic as ‘Dr Zhivago’, ‘The Lost Spy’ is one of the great non-fiction detective stories of our time.