Alex Matthews, the main player in Paul Vidich’s “The Poet’s Game,” appears, as he walks near the Moscow riverbank late one afternoon in 2018, to be “an ordinary middle-aged man who’d ...

Lebanon in 2006 is the danger-fraught setting of “Beirut Station,” Paul Vidich’s latest spy thriller. Analise Assad, a young Lebanese-American woman who favors Prada sunglasses and a modest ...

Set in Washington, D.C., in 1953, Vidich’s well-written first novel is long on atmosphere but short on narrative momentum. George Mueller, who’s at a turning point in his CIA career ...