A church parking lot in small-town Alabama, in heat that settles over your ribs and squeezes until breathing becomes a negotiation. This is where Sam Mulcahy's next war begins.
Twenty years in the field left Sam a map of scars and a truth he cannot outrun: his father was Viktor Kopytin, one of the Lenin Five-the deepest, most fanatical sleeper agents the Cold War ever produced. Now the war is over, the old man is dead, and one of the Five has surfaced in a forgotten Southern town, hiding behind a pulpit and a preacher's easy smile.
Girls are disappearing. The local law is bought. And the man orchestrating it all is a charlatan of the highest order-an operative who wears authority like a costume, because he learned young that the person behind the badge could be anyone.
To stop him, Sam turns to the only person more dangerous and more trusted than himself: his half-sister Sasha, a former SVR assassin who now leads a congregation that could never survive knowing what she has done.
The relentless sixth novel in the Coca-Cola City saga, The Charlatan is a scorching thriller about the sins fathers bury, the monsters they leave behind, and a brother and sister hunting one of their own.