Chris Shaw’s “The Manager — A Tale of the Cold War” covers a lot of ground. It begins in Saranac Lake in 1982 and ends in 2015 at Standing Rock, North Dakota. On a snowy February night, magazine editor Walter Loving picks up Igor Chernyenko, the manager of the Russian hockey team, who is trudging through the snow. This act of kindness is Loving’s first step onto an icy path that takes him, and the reader, to Lake Placid, Montreal and Sarajevo. It’s a wonderful journey — difficult, dangerous, literate, romantic — with Russian and American spies, Adirondack characters, lies, violence and the beautiful Olympic figure skater, Olga Zakova.

Soon after giving Chernyenko a ride into Lake Placid, Loving interviews Zakova for a profile, and there is a connection — they are both fans of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.

Before February ends, Loving has been visited by the FBI, smuggled Olga and two Russian hockey players to Montreal so they can defect and seek asylum, and almost been killed. One of the FBI agents works for the Russians, and Chernyenko, who was Olga’s lover for a time, is a member of the KGB who offers what he knows to the CIA before the novel ends. Olga, too, was trained to be a spy.

After Montreal, Olga returns to Russia. She isolates among the Komi in Siberia, seeking her tribal self in a frozen world far from the tensions between the Soviets and Americans. This is the most lyrical portion of “The Manager.” Among the Komi, Olga finds peace in the community’s rhythms and wonder in the dreams she experiences: “The woman led Olga under the ice where she observed entire life cycles of salmon and sturgeon.” And Olga skates on the Siberian ice, emerging from her internal exile to win the Gold medal at Sarajevo in ’84, where she is again interviewed by Walter Loving. Eventually, she returns to Montreal, teaching at McGill University.

In Lake Placid, Walter continues to write, hike and paddle. He connects intermittently with old friends, keeps on writing, confers with his bartender. But the players in the adventure and intrigue of the 1980s fade away, and his world shrinks: “All our old friends have died, left or gone to bed at nine o’clock.” The conclusion is Olga’s letter from North Dakota, reminding him of their connection: “You keep coming up in my thoughts and meditations. The binding energy of objectless love holds us together, too.”

“A Tale of the Cold War” is an incomplete subtitle. The book’s 33 years explore the business of journalism — Shaw was the editor of Adirondack Life — on both a personal and commercial level. It’s rich in literary allusions, from Montreal’s Saul Bellow to Russia’s Akhmatova. Environmental issues, which led Olga to protests at Standing Rock in North Dakota, are an important element of the story. And for Adirondackers, it’s fun to wonder which characters are real and which are fictional.

Chris Shaw’s “The Crazy Wisdom” and “The Power Line,” were reviewed in these pages. “The Manager” doesn’t form a trilogy, but there are echoes of the earlier novels here. All of them are good. This is the best.