Spies and Other Gods by James Wolff

Published by Atlantic Crime on April 14, 2026

Spies and Other Gods is already dated. An Iranian living in Paris tells his friend that tourism in Iran “is definitely increasing.” Not so much now.

This is a different kind of spy novel. The protagonist, Aphra McQueen, isn’t the kind of spy typically showcased in espionage fiction. She is a professor specializing in medieval history. For reasons not immediately shared with the reader, she takes a job as a researcher for Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, the entity charged with oversight of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

The committee recently installed a complaint system that allows whistleblowers to report concerns about MI6. Aphra is tasked with investigating the first confidential complaint.

Sir William Rentoul is the Head of the Service. He has no use for oversight. His goal is to identify the whistleblower while obstructing Aphra’s investigation. To that end, he assigns Susan, a building escort who keeps visitors from straying into secure areas, to safeguard the files that Susan wants to review.

The file begins with a police report from 2017 that concerns the murder of an exiled Iranian journalist living in the Netherlands. His mutilated body is eventually linked to other murdered Iranians in various cities across Europe, raising the fear that an Iranian assassin has been targeting people living outside the country who are regarded as enemies of the state. The whisteblower’s complaint alleged gross negligence in MI6’s response to the assassinations.

Susan gives Aphra time to read only a few pages before spiriting her off to interviews with staff members who were involved in the botched mission. Rentoul doesn’t expect Susan to get far because “the organisation Sir William runs has decades upon decades of experience in frustrating outsiders intent on getting to the bottom of things.”

Susan learns that MI6 tracked travelers from Iran to the cities in which the assassinations occurred to search for a common pattern. Investigators identified a professor of chemistry at Tehran University (code name CASPIAN) as the potential assassin. The Service identified CASPIAN’s nephew, a 41-year-old MBA student in Paris named Ali, as a potential source of information about CASPIAN.

To avoid a diplomatic kerfuffle with France, MI6 wanted to make its pitch to Ali in the UK. To that end, undercover agents contacted a British-Syrian dentist named Zak who lived with Ali for a time during his childhood. Using a pretext, an agent persuaded Zak to put him in touch with Ali. The agent struck up a long-distance relationship with Ali, ostensibly to gather information about his MBA program, then thanked him by inviting him to attend a soccer game in Manchester, where the recruitment was made. Ali now serves as a paid source of information, not just about his uncle but about the Iranian regime. He is regarded as an intelligence source of high value.

Aphra’s investigation is cut short when Susan plants a file on her, causing Aphra’s immediate dismissal and the threat of an arrest. Aphra has a goal of her own, however, so she continues the investigation by contacting Zak and (on the pretense of being an MI6 operative) persuades Zak to travel with her to Paris so she can meet Ali.

The story follows the twists and turns of Aphra’s investigation and MI6’s attempt to thwart her. At some point, Sir William travels to France to gather information about Aphra and Zak, much to the displeasure of his underlings, who understand the diplomatic difficulty of spying in France without alerting the French authorities. Sir William appears to be in the early stages of dementia, so it isn’t surprising that he botches the job.

James Wolff follows the tradition of John LeCarre’s later novels by painting a picture of British spies (the ones in charge, at any rate) as inept bureaucrats. The story builds suspense as Aphra and Zak execute dangerous plans to find the assassin while Sir William makes bumbling efforts to obstruct them.

Spies and Other Gods isn’t a fast-moving action novel, but Wolff keeps the story moving and spices it with occasional action scenes. The plot dishes out rewarding surprises, both in Aphra’s motivation and in the assassin’s identity.

The story is told by a third-person narrator who seems to be something like the spirit of MI6, or perhaps of the building in which MI6 is housed. “When individuals come together, particularly under the umbrella of an organisation with a distinctive purpose and history, something new comes into being . . . This might be called an organisation’s spirit, or soul, or ethos, or character, or simply its identity.” Perhaps the narrator is a god (“Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, or whatever the line is, that’s where you’ll find me,” he says near the story’s end). Whatever the narrator might be, Wolff’s narrative approach adds another layer of interest to the story.

Wolff is a former British intelligence officer. British intelligence has produced some of the smartest spy novelists. Spies and Other Gods is my first encounter with a Wolff novel. I look forward to reading more.

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The Cormorant Hunt by Michael Idov

Published by Scribner on January 27, 2026

Of current authors of spy novels, only a handful reside in my first tier. Michael Idov has made that list on the strength of The Collaborators and its sequel, The Cormorant Hunt.

In the first novel, CIA agent Ari Falk made trouble for himself by giving a recording to an open-source intelligence website operated by Alan Keegan. In the recording, veteran CIA agent Rex Harlow confesses that he attempted to rig Russia’s 1996 election and, twenty-five years later, murdered several people who got wind of his dirty tricks. Harlow referred to the operation’s mastermind as the Cormorant.

The story begins with Katya Lisichenko crossing into Estonia from Russia in the early stages of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She is detained because records show that she made the same crossing two days earlier. She didn’t, so someone must have been using her name.

The story then shifts to Keegan’s receipt of an email with the subject line “a message for Ari Falk.” Keegan doesn’t know how anyone would know of his connection to Falk, apart from people at the top of the CIA hierarchy. Keegan traces the email to Petra Lorencová, an employee of Radio Free Europe in the Czech Republic. He travels there and confronts Petra, who claims she was paid by an unknown source to send the email. The meeting does not end well for Petra or Keegan.

We next encounter Falk, who is living off the grid in the Republic of Georgia. Worried that he is being framed for Keegan’s fate, Falk decides it is time to run. The current deputy director of operations at the CIA (who owes her job to Falk’s outing of Harlow), Asha Tamaskar, dispatches a Mormon CIA agent, Jim Otterbeck, to find Falk. Otterbeck dislikes Falk but the feeling is mutual. It helps Falk’s cause that Otterbeck is straight-laced while Falk is devious.

The other primary plot element involves Felix Burnham, the “champagne version” of Andrew Tate, an advocate of a silly but popular “men’s rights” movement. Burnham has the “slippery, shape-shifting charisma of a born cult leader.” Burnham’s podcast appeals to insecure young men who blame their problems on women, LGBTQ people, and nonwhite immigrants rather than their own disagreeable personalities.

Burnham’s podcast is, naturally enough, financed by Russia in its never-ending attempt to destabilize progressive western nations. Using those funds, Burnham is “putting together a purpose-built private army.” Tamaskar would like to do something about it, but worries that she will be undermined by the Cormorant.

In addition to Ivov’s ridicule of the men’s rights movement, I appreciated his take on the dangers of the modern world. Falk understands that, thanks to Russia, the left-right distinction is no longer relevant. “The only existential standoff now was between the people who wanted to replace institutions with better institutions and the people who wanted to replace institutions with themselves.”

As was true of the first book, the story is clever. The plot eventually links characters in unexpected ways. While the action moves quickly, Ivov takes time to flesh out secondary characters, assigning credible motivations that are consistent with their actions. While characters take heroic risks for the greater good, I also enjoyed the characterization of the CIA’s hackers as “insufferable geeks who considered themselves God’s gift to the Agency.”

In this second novel, Ivov cements himself as a must-read author for spy novel fans. His prose is clear and forceful, even if he lacks the stylistic brilliance of the genre’s master, John Le Carré. That’s not a knock, because there was only one Le Carré. In his ability to craft credible but exciting plots, reasonably deep characters, and perceptive analyses of world events, Idov is an exceptional spy novelist.

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Pariah by Dan Fesperman

Published by Knopf on July 22, 2025

Pariah is built upon the kind of plot that intrigued Hitchcock. A person with no particular connection to international intrigue becomes embroiled in a spy story that threatens his life. Dan Fesperson gives the plot a new spin by making the protagonist something of a loser who does his best spying while drunk.

Hal Knight is not exactly Al Franken, but he’s a comedian/actor who got elected to Congress before he lost his seat because of untoward behavior. While Franken was railroaded over relatively benign conduct that was far too trivial to warrant the loss of his job, Hal engaged in the kind of sexual harassment on a movie set (including the brief exposure of his reproductive organ) that gets people fired.

Hal is hiding in a small island in the Caribbean when the novel begins. He hasn’t checked social media and isn’t aware that he’s been invited by tweet to visit Bolrovia, a small nation that was once part of the Soviet Union. Its dictator, Nikolai Horvatz, is a fan of Hal’s trashy movies — the kind that depend on jiggling breasts to supplement the laughs. Hal has no desire to bring more attention to himself, but a team of CIA agents convince him that he will be serving the nation by accepting the offer and doing a bit of snooping. The CIA has few agents on the ground in Bolrovia because the head of Horvatz’s security service, Branko Sarič, has eliminated most of them.

The CIA knows that Horvatz is up to something nefarious but they aren’t sure what. Hal’s assignment is to keep his eyes open and report what he sees. The chance to serve his country might rehabilitate his image when the public learns of it and, in any event, Hal agrees because he has nothing better to do. Knowing that his phone and computer will be monitored, agents give Hal a notebook with instructions for dropping off his reports in exchange for blank replacement pages.

In Bolrovia, Pavel Lukov is assigned to mind Hal. Lukov has no great love for Horvatz and even less for his boss Sarič, so the reader might feel sorry for him when Hal evades him for enough time to drop off his reports. It seems likely that innocent Lukov will be blamed when events take a wrong turn.

Hal also meets some Americans in Bolrovia who might be involved with Horvatz’s nefarious scheme. Fesperson hides the nature of the scheme for most of the novel so I won’t reveal it. I can say that it is credible and, for a welcome change, doesn’t involve nuclear bombs.

Hal is in over his head, as he demonstrates when he drunkenly sends a message to his ex that he hopes Sarič won’t understand. As the reader might expect, Hal’s mission goes tits up after he learns about Horvatz’s secret plan. At that point, Pariah turns into an action novel as Hal (with the help of CIA agents who go rogue rather than abandoning their asset) scrambles to escape from Bolrovia. Shootouts ensue. Hal’s focus is on not getting shot but he does manage to contribute to the action.

The reader will likely hope that Hal learns something from his disgraced exit from Congress and his foolishly heroic escapades in Bolrovia. One of the novel’s best moments occurs when Hal, delivering a standup comedy performance for Horvatz, embarrasses the dictator in a way that goes over his head. By the time anyone has the nerve to tell Horvatz that he has been made the butt of a joke, Hal is eluding Sarič’s goons and running for his tragically wasted life.

The other memorable moment involves Lukov’s decision to deliver Hal to Sarič or to betray his leader and put his life at risk by helping Hal escape. A good moral dilemma is an essential ingredient of top-notch spy fiction. While Hal’s  actions are driven by self-interest or intoxication, Lukov needs to decide whether he is prepared to make the sacrifices that accompany resistance to a dictator. Fesperman allows the reader to feel all the arbitrary violence that dictators depend upon to control their populations.

Making the protagonist a comedian allows Fesperman to introduce humor into the plot, but comedy is not the novel’s focus. Instead, the life-changing decisions forced upon Hal and Lukov add substance and heart to the story. Fesperman achieves a workable balance of humor and pathos without sacrificing the thrills that spy novel fans crave.

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A Spy at War by Charles Beaumont

Published by Canelo on March 27, 2025

My favorite spy stories pit British or American spies against Russians. For an obvious reason (his name is Putin), Russians are making a comeback as the favored spy novel villains. The titular war in A Spy at War is between Russia and Ukraine, making this the first spy novel I’ve read that focuses on that conflict.

My favorite spy stories challenge the reader to guess the identity of a double agent or mole. A Spy at War follows that tradition.

Former British spy Simon Sharman now works in the private sector. He fled the UK after a series of “suspicious events” involving a hedge fund manager. Those events were the subject of A Spy Alone, in which Simon investigated Oxford graduates who went on to be influenced by Russian money. Simon has traveled to Ukraine on a fake Italian passport and is posing as a journalist using a fake Polish press card.

Simon is pursuing Chovka Buchayev, the Chechen assassin who killed his business partner, Evie Howard. Simon intends to kill Chovka but other interested parties want Chovka to defect. They regard Simon as the perfect person to recruit him. The story builds tension as Simon approaches the front line with the belief that Chovka wants to meet him. When the mission goes awry, Simon needs to identify the insider who betrayed him.

The plot leads to a tense if predictable scene that forces Simon to choose between using Chovka for his intelligence value or surrendering to his rage and putting an end to Chovka’s life. In a typical American thriller, the protagonist would pull the trigger and be done with it. I always appreciate a good moral dilemma in a spy novel, particularly when characters actually care about morality.

Chovka receives more characterization than is common for a thriller villain. “Chovka was a survivor, not a hero. Survivors figure out which people have power and make themselves useful to those people.” At several moments in the story, Charles Beaumont demonstrates how that attitude shapes Chovka’s life and decisions.

Unlike Chovka, Simon’s decisions are influenced by values other than greed and convenience. Simon is portrayed as a man suffering from burnout, a weariness with the life he has chosen, who nevertheless uses his experience and intellect to assemble clues as he learns more about his former colleagues from Oxford.

When his story isn’t focused on Simon or Chovka, Beaumont treats the reader to dry British humor in his descriptions of bureaucratic meetings where decisions are made or manipulated. Russian assets are working to undermine British support for Ukraine. It takes a couple of sharp women — including Sarah du Cane, an Oxford professor who serves as an advisor to the British government — to thwart him.

The focus on Russia’s attempts to manipulate public and political opinion about Ukraine gives the novel some currency. The novel takes place in 2022, before the recent change of administration in the US, but its reminder that Russian propaganda is a potent tool of war might be even more relevant in 2025. The argument for selling out Ukraine — “Ukraine can’t win so we should let Russia keep the bits it’s already taken” — sounds depressingly familiar. "You don't have the cards" is how Trump put it.

In the novel, Russian propaganda includes a claim that western contributions of money for the war are being skimmed by Ukrainian oligarchs. The rumor is picked up by bloggers and bots, then amplified until it becomes the basis for policy at the hands of the Russian asset in the British government. Again, the discussions seem spot on. Espionage has always relied on disinformation, but social media provides perfect networks to spread lies until they are mistaken for reality. We all know that, but this is one of the best treatments of the subject I’ve seen in a spy novel.

While A Spy at War isn’t an action novel, characters are often imperiled. The plot moves quickly. The ending is something of a cliffhanger, although it isn’t difficult to guess how the next novel in the trilogy will begin. I could be wrong, but the ambiguous outcome of Simon’s confrontation with Chovka can only go in one direction if Simon still has a story to tell in the last novel of the trilogy.

It might be helpful to read A Spy Alone before reading its sequel. I didn’t. While A Spy at War explains critical events that took place in the earlier novel, I had the sense that I was missing context. Fortunately, any gaps in my understanding of earlier events in Simon’s life did not impair my ability to enjoy this bridge novel in the trilogy.

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Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on December 3, 2024

Gabriel’s Moon is the sort of book that Hitchcock would have filmed. It has a plot he favored — an innocent man is caught up in a cloak-and-dagger world, manipulated by people he thought he could trust until they try to kill him, forcing him to use his wits to survive.

The story takes place during the Cold War. It builds on evidence that President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to assassinate the Congo’s new Prime Minister because of his paranoid belief that Patrice Lumumba was too cozy with communists. The CIA has never been a friend of democracy.

Gabriel Dax is a London-based travel writer. He’s also something of a part-time spy. His brother Sefton works for the Foreign Office and, although they are not close (“both of them recognized their essential incompatibility”), Sefton occasionally asks Gabriel for a favor — hand delivering a small package to someone in Copenhagen, for example. Gabriel’s work, including a position with a leftwing magazine, gives him an excuse to travel, and he doesn’t mind earning extra money by performing clandestine tasks that seem reasonably safe.

Gabriel is working on a book about rivers, juxtaposing familiar waters like the Mississippi and unfamiliar (to the British anyway) locales like Hattiesburg. Rivers are a familiar metaphor for the flow of a life, and Gabriel recognizes that his own runs “underground, more like a sewer than a river.”

A writing assignment for the magazine takes him to Léopoldville, in the newly independent republic of the Congo, where an old friend from university is now the Minister of Health. He records an interview with Lumumba, who rambles a bit about Eisenhower’s plot to assassinate him, spearheaded by three names Gabriel doesn’t recognize. After Lumumba is murdered, the tape recordings prove to be more dangerous for Gabriel than any clandestine work he does for his brother.

Flying back from the Congo, Gabriel notices an attractive woman reading one of his travel books. After he encounters the woman again, he learns that their meetings are not a coincidence, that she — Faith Green — is also a spy. Soon he finds himself doing favors for her. Faith sends him to Spain to purchase drawings from an artist and deliver them to someone else. The "someone else" turns out to be Kit Caldwell, the CIA station chief in Madrid. The tasks pay well and Gabriel gets a buzz from working undercover.

As the story progresses, it becomes unclear whether Caldwell is a good guy or a bad guy, but Gabriel helps him when he seems to be in a pickle, perhaps because he senses that labels don’t matter in the shadowy world of espionage. Caldwell seems to be a decent person regardless of his ideology. The truth about Caldwell comes as something of a surprise, but there are bigger surprises to come. That’s one of the joys of spy novels; characters are so often not what they seem.

The story opens with a fire that burned down Gabriel’s childhood home. Gabriel has always lived with the belief that a candle in a moon-shaped nightlight in his room caused the fire. He has untrustworthy memories of seeing his mother on the kitchen floor and knowing that she was dead before he was rescued. His adult sessions with a therapist to treat his insomnia give the reader insight into his personality. Gabriel recovers important memories after following his therapist’s advice to learn more about the events surrounding his mother’s death, developing a critical story within the larger plot.

Gabriel’s personality evolves during his relationship with Faith, about whom he becomes a bit obsessive. Gabriel gains self-confidence as he overcomes obstacles, including near-death experiences, but is he sufficiently confident to deal honestly with his attraction to Faith? The question becomes moot when he discovers her true nature — and his own.

Ultimately, Gabriel’s Moon is about the birth and maturation of a spy. By the end, Gabriel would like to return to his life as a writer, but like joining the mob, once you enter the world of espionage, there’s no way to leave. Perhaps that means that Gabriel Dax will turn up again. As a spy novel fan, I can only hope that’s true, as William Boyd knows how to mix suspense, intrigue, and amgibuity, the key ingredients of a good spy thriller.

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