Traitors by Robert McCaw
Thursday, July 16, 2026 at 10:36AM 
Published by W. W. Norton & Company on July 7, 2026
Traitors is set in a post-Trump world. The new president, Roger Clayton, is a Democrat. A coup in Russia has replaced Putin with an even more hardline dictator, one who plans to invade Finland despite Russia’s botched attempt to capture Ukraine.
Robert Cooper befriended Clayton as an undergraduate, wrote position papers for him during his campaign, and is now the deputy assistant attorney general for counterintelligence in the DOJ’s National Security Division. That’s a pretty good job, but Clayton is about to nominate Cooper to become the assistant attorney general in charge of the NSD.
Cooper’s nomination will be undermined by Alice Boufort, a DOJ employee with more seniority who feels entitled to the position by her obsession with defeating Russian spies, a quest born of her desire to avenge her father, who was tortured and killed by “communist agitators aligned with the Russian KGB.” Boufort has the ear of a key senator who believes the gossip she feeds him about Cooper’s unreliable job performance.
As the title implies, the plot concerns Russian sleeper agents who are positioned in the US government. There are too many of them to be credible, but implausibility didn’t stop Robert Ludlum from premising some pretty good thrillers on networks of traitors who conspire with foreign governments to overthrow the US.
Cooper learns about one of the sleeper agents from a Russian spy who wants to defect in exchange for protection and a new identity. While wary that the Russian spy might be a double agent feeding him disinformation, Cooper confirms that a congressman is feeding classified information to Russia. Unfortunately, the congressman is murdered before he can be arrested and interrogated.
The Russian spy has warned Cooper not to trust the FBI, so the person who leaked information leading to the congressman’s assassination seems to be positioned close to Cooper’s office. Cooper spends the novel tracking down the remaining four sleeper agents who have infected American government before they can carry out a nefarious scheme to shift American political power to isolationists who refuse to oppose Russia's power grabs. Russia believes the scheme will enable it to invade Finland without resistance by the US, NATO obligations notwithstanding.
The elements of a conventional conspiracy thriller are present in Traitors, but the story is formulaic. It’s Ludlum light. The novel checks off the expected plot points without the excitement or tension that a good spy novel should evoke. I attribute that failure to Robert McCaw’s dry, “just the facts” writing style. The novel is blurbed as an “edge of your seat” page turner, but my butt remained firmly positioned in the middle of my seat as I yawned between page turns.
Cooper is a straightlaced patriot, someone we would want to hold an intelligence position in the real world, but his absence of passion makes him a dull bureaucrat whose personality is noticeably absent. James Bond, Robert Cooper is not. Nor is he the exemplar of bureaucrats in the spy game, George Smiley. Bond had panache and Smiley had emotional depth. Cooper is more of a Joe Friday. He would have made a fine black-and-white television character in the 1950s, but he’s a bit of a bore compared to the spies that genre fans embrace.
The power struggle between Cooper and Boufort is only mildly interesting. I appreciated the depiction of Putin’s vulnerability to far-right actors in his country but never got the sense of a world on the edge of a world war. In the end, Traitors struck me as the outline of a thriller that others have already written, without the fleshed-out characters and plot twists that might have made the novel stand out among its peers.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS