Book Review: The Traitor by Ava Glass

The Traitor is an enormous contrast to Ava Glass’s first Emma Makepeace thriller, Alias Emma, where British spy Emma Makepeace’s prime directive was to “Stay dark.” She was to stay away from London’s omnipresent CCTV cameras whilst shepherding Michael Primalov, the son of high value foreign agents, to safety at the SIS building (aka “the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence agency”). Emma’s boss Ripley laid it out.

Avoid all cameras, they’re not ours right now. Be careful with M. No calls. No tech. Move fast. Stay dark.

 

Translation—Ripley is not available to help Emma, he’s gone dark. M (Ed Masterson, his second-in-command) is not to be trusted. The neighbors are M16, which means Emma must get Michael to their headquarters across the river at Vauxhall Cross—while avoiding all CCTV cameras—thus they can’t use buses, cars, the Tube, ATMs, cellphones, or credit cards.

There is still tension between the enigmatic and purposefully anonymous Mr. Ripley and Ed Masterson, his second-in-command. Emma suspects Ed of coveting Ripley’s job and trying to push him out—Masterson doesn’t have much use for Emma either. Emma has a new job, working within “a small intelligence unit so secret it didn’t have a name.”

The reason for the secrecy was obvious, once you understood that the Agency’s work focused on identifying and stopping Russian spies working inside Britain.

 

Lately, that work had been constant. Tensions between London and Moscow were the worst anyone could remember. Everything felt dangerous—as if the world had become flammable and each nation clutched a lit match.

A brilliant young analyst/operative, Stephen Garrick, is discovered dead, his body “locked in a suitcase inside his own apartment,” making it clear that he’s been murdered. It’s a closed room mystery: M16 professionals can’t find fingerprints during their exhaustive clean-up operation. Who is responsible? Stephen had been working on Russian money-laundering and influence peddling; he had become “obsessed” with his brief. Andrew Field explains to Ripley and Emma what that entailed.

“He believed there were actually three people in this organization. Andrei Volkov, Oleg Federov, and someone else—someone he couldn’t identify. Someone British, with connections. Possibly inside this government. But he could never find proof. And then the operation was shut down. He took it very badly.”

Was his assassination meant to send a message to M16? Should they cease investigating Russian oligarchs? Obviously, that’s not an option but how does they gain access to the oligarchs’ inner sanctums? 

In the end, it was Emma who came up with the idea. It was the day after Stephen Garrick’s body had been discovered, and she’d been rereading Andrei Volkov’s file, searching for a crack in his life she could step into. Finally, she’d thrown the document down, and said, “It seems to me he lives on his yacht more than in any of his houses.”

 

There was a long pause as her words sank through the smoke that filled Ripley’s oak-panelled office.

 

Ripley glanced at Field. “Could be an option.”

 

Field, who’d been slumped in a chair, red-eyed with exhaustion, straightened. “Not could be. Is. I know someone who could make it happen. But we’d need the right person. Young. Good-looking.”

 

In tandem, he and Ripley turned to Emma and studied her speculatively.

Bang. You’re it, Emma. It’s fascinating to watch “disguise specialist Martha Davies” work with Emma—nothing phases her. She tells Emma, “Ripley says you’re going on a superyacht, you jammy bastard. I’ve got about a thousand things you could wear, but you’ll only need a few,” plus a glam-up. Emma is going undercover as posh girl Jessica Marshall, an avid Instagrammer who’s looking for excitement.  

In The Traitor, everything’s in the open: Emma hides her identity and mission in plain sight. Her immediate task is to get hired on as a crew member on Volkov’s yacht Eden, “scheduled to set sail from the Côte d’Azur to Monaco.” Annabel, another in a long line of “Englishwomen with an innate ability to appear formidable while barely saying anything,” takes Emma through yachting 101. Emma recognizes Eden from a photograph.

“This is the Eden. Over ninety meters long. Volkov had her custom made in Sweden, as a cost of eighty million dollars. She’s high-tech and surprisingly fast. She has two swimming pools, a helipad, a spa with a sauna, and a glass elevator. Basically, she’s an oligarch’s wet dream.”

Annabel shows Emma pictures of attractive young people, all wearing “navy blue pullovers bearing the words “THE EDEN” in white. She says the vessel has only eight crew members: “it’s a skeleton crew.”

“Why so few?” Emma asked.

 

Jon answered, “Because Andrei Volkov is paranoid and cheap. He doesn’t want anyone on his boat at all, but he also wants to be waited on constantly. A small crew is the compromise.”

Paranoid and cheap—what could go wrong? Even if Emma looks the part and has a mythically pristine background, something might still screw up and she’d be naïve to believe that her snooping will go undetected.  But she has her marching orders. Annabel lays it out succinctly. 

“I think it’s fair to say,” Annabel interjected, “we don’t really know enough about Volkov. He’s always flown under the radar. And we would very much like to know more. That’s where you come in.”

Come on board Eden. Your heart will be in your throat as you watch Emma serve drinks, get friendly with the crew, and explain her way out of a few too many being in the wrong place at the wrong time incidents. What if something goes wrong: is there a way to call for help and to get rescued? It seems like a suicide mission. Volkov is unpredictable, his model girlfriend is volatile and needy, and the crew is either ignorant or complicit. 

The Traitor is a nail-biter follow-up to a blazingly good debut thriller. Last year Glass shared that “the TV pilot and an outline of the Alias Emma series are still in the planning stage but she’s hopeful the project will move forward.” I can’t wait to see what’s next in store for Emma Makepeace.