The Ivan Spruce

A Novel

A woman steps out of a steamy Yellowstone panorama into the perspective of another fisherman. She is Marta Senkova, daughter of high level Soviet officials. He is Jonathon Masters, New York engineering entrepreneur. Their fly rods, and then the intrigue of his special trout fly, are the first threads of the bond that draws him toward this beautiful, mercurial, girl. This bond will also pull him, and his men, into an orbit with her diplomat father that takes them inside a brotherhood of Western style expediters, a hidden vitality of the Soviets since Lenin, and then onto a central stage of the perestroika. Marta will also be in this collaboration of talents, and in a way that reawakens the bond between her father, Ivan Senkov, and her mother—the redoubtable Marta prototype, Natalia Senkova. This nose-poke of the Masters’ crew will provoke a massively impetuous put up or shut up gauntlet from the subterranean Soviet talents it has bumped into—a challenge that Jon Masters can’t untangle from the new trends Russian woman who matched him on a trout stream, and now is exercising her other intrigues on behalf of this new challenge—and love for the American man.