The Cover Wife by Dan Fesperman

Published by Knopf on July 6, 2021

In a certain kind of spy novel, nothing is as it seems. There are secrets within secrets. False identities conceal other false identities. Telling the good guys from the bad, the truth from lies, becomes as difficult for the reader as it is for the protagonist. Spy novels of that nature are good fun when they are handled skillfully. The Cover Wife is Dan Fesperman’s tutorial in deception.

Professor Winston Armitage, a scholar of Aramaic and Arabic languages, has written a book that contends the Quran has been mistranslated. The virgins that have been promised to martyrs are actually raisins or white grapes. Since terrorists would be unlikely to sacrifice their lives for raisins in the afterlife, even particularly delicious raisins, the book is intended to cause a stir in the terrorist community. At least, the CIA hopes that will be the result. Armitage is going on a book tour at the CIA’s expense, a scheme of information warfare cooked up by Paul Bridger, who manages operations across Europe.

Claire Saylor has a complicated history with Bridger. He assigns Claire to the team that will guard Armitage. She will play the role of Armitage’s wife. In an unofficial role, Bridger wants Claire to conduct surveillance in Hamburg. She conducts unofficial surveillance of her own and photographs someone in Hamburg who might be running the operation, using Bridger as a front.

Two other characters in Hamburg are important to the story. One is a young man named Mahmoud who seems to be a willing and eager recruit to Osama bin Laden’s cause. The other is Ken Donlan, an FBI agent in Hamburg who has worked with Claire in the past. Claire and Ken encounter each other while they are both keeping a clandestine eye on Mahmoud.

They observe that Mahmoud seems to be getting along well with a group of young Muslims who are associated with terrorism. One member of the group is getting married. Another of Mahmoud's friends is already married but is being sent away on a mission. The young man’s headstrong wife entreats Mahmoud to talk her husband out of doing whatever he has been assigned to do. Mahmoud is enchanted and unnerved by the woman’s beauty. Even seeing her uncovered face seems like a sin for which he will need to atone. Mahmoud feels torn by divided loyalty to his friend and to a woman who will be at risk if she interferes with his friend’s assignment.

The plot could move in many directions. Part of the intrigue is generated by uncertainty. What is the story about? What is Bridger’s endgame? Who is the mysterious man in Claire’s photograph? What plan is taking Mahmoud and his friends away from Hamburg? The questions eventually converge, yielding a surprising answer that causes the reader to rethink assumptions about how the plot has unfolded. Fesperman misleads the reader, but only because his characters are misled. In fact, the reader will come to understand the story’s key truth before it becomes apparent to the characters.

Claire and Ken are reasonably complex and likable characters. They play the civil servant role that is common in espionage thrillers — spies who want to do the right thing but haven’t been told the secrets that will help them understand what is right and what is wrong. They work for bureaucrats who are also common in spy thrillers, employees who have risen in the ranks because of their ability to stab others in the back to protect their positions.

Fesperman conceived an excellent idea and avoided being overly ambitious in its execution. He puts all of those elements into play to tell a relatively simple story that seems complex to the characters, simply because they aren’t allowed to see the big picture. For pulling off a credible surprise — the kind of surprise that, when the truth dawns on the reader, will provoke an “Oh wow” — at the end of an entertaining story, Fesperman earns an easy recommendation.

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Shadow Target by David Ricciardi

Published by Berkley on June 15, 2021

Shadow Target is the fourth book in the Jake Keller series. I was indifferent to the first novel and didn’t read the next two. The fourth installment isn’t a bad action novel.

Jake works for the CIA in its “elite Special Activities Center,” meaning he kills people who, in the divine wisdom of the CIA, ought to be dead. He used to be named Zachary but he changed his face and name in response to adverse publicity. Not that paramilitary CIA officers are ever likely to attract favorable publicity.

The novel begins with a plane crash in the Alps. Jake is the only survivor, a tribute to the good luck enjoyed by thriller heroes. Jake crawls into the woods and conceals himself as a helicopter lands. The killers on the helicopter who want to seal his fate are chased away by a rescue helicopter before they can find Jake. When Jake wakes up, he has a dim memory of seeing something that explains the crash but he can’t remember what he saw. He is pretty sure, however, that someone tried to kill him.

As Jake frets about his lost memory and the foiled attempt on his life, he becomes convinced that too many other paramilitary operatives have been dying. His superiors don’t seem to have noticed, or they’ve chalked it up to a dangerous job. Jake decides that someone is deliberately killing CIA agents and that a betrayer in the CIA must be facilitating that project by providing information about agents’ identities and missions. Jake makes it his mission to save his own life and the lives of other CIA agents by learning the identities of the betrayer and the person who is orchestrating the betrayal.

Shadow Target is a standard action novel. In the words of Shadow, the CIA officer who is helping the bad guy, Jake is “the best paramilitary officer I’ve ever seen.” Of course he is. Unlike truly bad action fiction, Jake isn’t infallible or invulnerable, although he’s certainly hard to kill. Like nearly all action spies, he “threads the needle” between “doing what he thinks is right” and doing what he’s told to do. There’s nothing new or particularly interesting in Jake’s characterization. He does, however, have a thing going with a French spy — or at least he did before he changed his name and face and was presumed dead. She’s a bit cheesed off when he resurfaces after a period of being dead, without having sent so much as a postcard. The relationship and Jake’s total inability to understand women humanizes him.

While he’s going about his business, Jake discovers that a fellow named Nikolai Kozlov has a plan to kill a Very Important Person during a London visit. The plan involves an unlikely weapon and opening a window to use it, something that security police are likely to notice, but what the heck. Kozlov has some operatives of his own who are tasked with killing Jake because he’s the only person in the world who is likely to stop the assassination. Naturally, they aren’t up to Jake’s standards. Again, this is standard fare, but Jake’s ability to survive the various attempts to kill him keep the story moving at a good pace.

The plot delivers few surprises, but it does produce some fun action scenes. David Ricciardi’s explanation for the initial targeting of Jake is a bit convoluted but that’s life in the world of modern thrillers. In fact, the reason for Kozlov’s targeting of paramilitary CIA operatives in general is convoluted, in part because Ricciardi uses misdirection to keep the reader (or Jake) guessing. In the end, I was willing to buy into the story for the sake of enjoying the action, even if the plot skates on a thin sheet of credibility.

RECOMMENDED

The Old Enemy by Henry Porter

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 8, 2021

The Old Enemy continues and perhaps concludes the story that began in Firefly. While The Old Enemy is the third book in a series, a reader can enjoy it as a standalone thriller.

The novel begins with the murder of a retired and revered spy named Robert Harland. As death is approaching, Harland manages to leave a message for his wife that identifies his killer. Finding the code that explains the message is one of the many tasks that Harland’s old friend, Paul Samson, eventually undertakes.

Before he learns of Harland’s death, however, Samson is busy protecting Zoe Freemantle, who works for an organization called GreenState. Samson has been assigned that task by Macy Harp, the head of the private intelligence firm that is Samson’s employer. Samson doesn’t know why he’s protecting Freemantle, nor does Freemantle know that Samson has been hired to protect her. She might even think he’s stalking her. Samson only knows that Freemantle seems to have a connection to a building that has attracted the attention of government agencies in Great Britain and elsewhere. As Freemantle approaches that building, someone attacks Samson with a knife, but whether the attacker was targeting Samson or Freemantle is unclear.

As all of that unfolds, Denis Hisami is preparing to give testimony before Congress. Hisami is married to Anastasia Christakos. In an earlier novel, Samson rescued Anastasia from a kidnapping and now carries a torch for her. Hisami is about to reveal a major conspiracy that has reached high levels of government in the US and UK, but he’s poisoned before he reaches that point in his testimony.

Samson initially wonders whether Russians are getting even with all the people who played a role in recovering Anastasia from her kidnappers. The murder of Harland and the attempted murders of Hisami and Samson turn out to be part of a more complicated conspiracy. Samson pieces the conspiracy together with the help of his hacker friend Naji Touma, a resourceful young man Samson rescued in Firefly. Samson finds it difficult to pin down Naji to find out what he knows, a difficulty of intelligence gathering that bedevils Samson throughout the novel.

Despite the conspiracy’s complexity, the reader isn’t likely to get lost. Henry Porter provides internal summaries and other reminders of events that are critical to the plot, including important moments from the first two novels. The plot never becomes convoluted. Porter peppers the plot with action scenes without dumbing down the story. Like most fictional conspiracies, this one is driven by money and power. I’ll give Porter credit for crafting a credible conspiracy, or at least one that is more plausible than a typical Ludlum conspiracy.

I also give Porter credit for creating an interesting character in Paul Samson. He has the kind of tortured personality that makes a spy sympathetic. The plot takes Samson to various settings around the world while making clear that “the old enemy” — Russia — is still the one most likely to make serious trouble for western democracies. I don’t know if he intends to bring back Porter in future novels, but he is a worthy addition to the canon of fictional spies who make espionage fiction so enjoyable.

RECOMMENDED

Slough House by Mick Herron

Published by Soho Crime on February 9, 2021

Members of a group called the Yellow Vests are making noise about British pride, referring of course to white pride. While Slough House avoids direct mention of Brexit, Mick Herron alludes to it throughout the novel, painting its proponents as chumps and the politicians who endorse it as power hungry chump manipulators.

Peter Judd is one of the manipulators. He’s using Desmond Flint as his stalking horse. Until Judd takes ownership of him, Flint is part of an unruly mob who are trying to “own the libs.” Judd is manipulating Flint into a position of power, a position that Judd plans to control.

Judd believes he also controls Diana Taverner, who occupies the First Desk at the Secret Intelligence Service. Judd and a few other men of wealth bankrolled an off-the-books operation that Taverner directed without the knowledge of her superiors or the Prime Minister. Seeking revenge for a GRU murder of British agents, Taverner commissioned an assassination of her own on Russian soil. The private funding made it possible to do so without seeking permission that never would have been granted.

The GRU, of course, doesn’t appreciate Taverner’s retaliation, so it sends two assassins to England to perform a counterretaliation. To make that mission work, it needs to identify some agents. The GRU has acquired an archived list of agents from a wealthy young media owner named Damien Cantor, who believes that owning a news channel is “like putting a deposit down on a government.” The list is so old that some of the agents are no longer working. All of the agents happen to be assigned to Slough House, where the SIS sends spies who turn out to be useless when it doesn’t kill them instead.

The plot thus parallels current themes in British politics, from rising nationalism and Brexit to media influence and image as a substitute for substance. The plot begins with the murder of former Slough House agents. The killings coincide with a training exercise that irritates Jackson Lamb almost as much as the murders. Lamb is the curator of Slough House and perhaps the most unlikely spy master in the history of spy fiction. Lamb despises his agents (or at least that’s his claim) but he is solidly behind them, following the code of protecting his joes at all cost. When it becomes clear that his joes are being targeted, Jackson doesn’t let Taverner get in the way of doing what he believes should be done. The slow horses at Slough House might not be the best that Britain has to offer, but under Jackson’ guidance, they’re always good enough.

No other series in spy fiction infuses the intrigue of espionage with humor as effectively as the Slough House books. The supporting cast is quirky — Roderick Ho unrealistically regards himself as James Bond; Shirley Dander regularly gets drunk and sleeps around, River Cartwright never quite lives up to the standard set by his legendary grandfather — but they are endearing in their own ways. Rarely does a book go by in which a slow horse doesn’t die and it’s always a bit sad when that happens.

Much of the humor comes from Herron’s keen observation of the world: “When they went on about sixty being the new forty, they forgot to add that that made thirty-something the new twelve.” Herron alternates between dry wit and fart jokes, always achieving a perfect balance of humor and drama. His stories make clear that the world’s evil is not confined to places like Russia and China but is equally embodied in the lust for power that threatens all democracies. Every book in this series is a winner; Slough House is no exception.

RECOMMENDED

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré

Published by Viking on September 5, 2017

John le Carré created the most extraordinary character in spy fiction when George Smiley appeared in Call for the Dead (1961). Smiley became a primary or secondary character in several other novels, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), the novel that put John le Carré on the map. In the Karla trilogy (1974 to 1979) — the best spy novels and among the finest literary novels I’ve ever read — Smiley unmasks a mole in British intelligence. Smiley was a moral man who used immoral means to do his job well and suffered for it. Younger than Smiley but often at his side was Peter Guillam, a key player who helped Smiley gather information that exposed the double agent and brought down Karla, the mole’s handler.

John le Carré died at the end of 2020, leaving behind a legacy of brilliant spy fiction (plus a mainstream novel that I quite enjoyed). His final novel, published in 2019, was a standalone. Two years before the release of that novel, he penned the aptly titled A Legacy of Spies, the last novel in the Smiley series. In many ways, it showcases his own legacy by reaching back to the events in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and explaining how events leading up to and following the tragedy of that novel — Alec Leamas and Liz Gold are shot at the Berlin Wall — were manipulated by Smiley and the man known only as Control.

At Smiley’s direction, Guillam has kept the true details of that incident out of the official record. Eventually the truth bites at his ankles, as Alec’s son, Cristoph, together with Liz’s daughter Karen, have sued the government, claiming that it is complicit in their parents’ deaths. Well, they’re right about that to some degree, although they don’t know all the details of Operation Windfall, conceived to smoke out the traitor in the upper ranks of the Secret Intelligence Service and to mislead Russia while protecting a vital source, an operation that had unfortunate consequences for Leamas and Gold.

Now the SIS needs to feed someone to the wolves to satisfy Parliament. Smiley is nowhere to be found. Official files have disappeared and, if they could be found, they would be covered with Guillam’s fingerprints. Guillam is politely interrogated before being locked in a library where he can read some of the secret files he hid (although not the ones he concealed off premises) as a prelude to answering more questions. Much of the novel is told in Guillam’s memory as he reads memoranda, some of which he wrote, and tries to assemble a coherent story about the past that doesn’t quite live up to the truth. As he does so, he fears that only Smiley can save him from his own indiscretions.

It put a smile on my face just to read the names of characters who have become iconic in spy fiction: Toby Esterhase, Bill Hayden, and the memorable Jim Prideaux, who makes a brief appearance near the novel’s end, quite unchanged since his featured role in The Honourable Schoolboy. And of course Smiley himself, still idealistic, still troubled by the moral choices that challenge his idealism. Looking back on his life, Smiley admits that he has never cared about preserving capitalism or Christendom. His duty was to England, not the England of Brexit but an England that was “leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason.” That England, he frets, may be moving away from reason and returning to darkness, as was much of the world when A Legacy of Spies was published.

Guillam is old as he tells this story. Unless John le Carré left a nearly finished manuscript lying about, it is his last appearance, a last glimpse of all the characters who did their best during the Cold War to lead England out of darkness. It offers the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is Smiley’s career and puts a frame around the completed picture. John le Carré did his fans a huge favor, and added to an unparalleled legacy of his own, with A Legacy of Spies.

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