Monday, 7 October: Emma Makepeace, a British spy whose reputation precedes her, is faced with her greatest challenge yet. She has one week to prevent the Russians from assassinating one of the leaders of the Group of Seven, who are about to meet in Edinburgh. A refresher; the G7 is “an informal grouping of Western…
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…
The indignities of age just keep getting heaped upon the shoulders of our hero, the intrepid, incorruptible Russian police detective Arkady Renko. In his professional life, he’s been forced into a pointless desk job by his politically ambitious boss. In his personal life, his longtime lover Tatiana Petrovna has chosen her career as an investigative…
The world of the CIA gets a realistic spin in Woodward’s follow-up to The Handler. John and Meredith Dale are divorced, and while Meredith continues to operate in the spy world, John wants nothing to do with that life anymore. Negotiations for a nuclear deal between Iran and the United States are delicate, and the…
In summer 2019 I read an article about Project Iceworm, an American military base built under the ice in Greenland in the 1960s. Let me rephrase that with a little more context: In summer 2019 my wife and I had just separated, and I’d moved into a house nearby that belonged to my mother-in-law to…
Moscow Exile initially unfolds as a fast romp through the exploits of British intelligence agents who played for Mother Russia. Intense high-level espionage takes place in Washington, D.C. in the late nineteen-forties, post-war years that encompassed the Red Scare and the McCarthy Hearings. Although it wasn’t much of a romp when aristocratic Englishmen Guy Burgess…
(A tip of the hat to Warren Clarke—1947-2014) Picture this: You have finished your novel, and as the euphoria evaporates, the publishers say, “How about a sequel?” By now the euphoria has been sucked into the stratosphere because … you haven’t the faintest idea what to write next. What does the honest writer do?…
Hot off the success of the Netflix smash film, The Gray Man, Mark Greaney brings back Court Gentry for his twelfth appearance in this intense series. Gentry is trying to hide from the authorities looking to kill him, but when his former CIA handler Suzanne Brewer reaches out, he can’t say no. Teaming up with…
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How could I meet some African cops? I could go to Africa and get arrested, but that seemed less than ideal. I was writing a novel, a thriller called Wealth Management, and I wanted the characters to include a detective from Africa (he would travel to Switzerland to investigate a financial crime with a connection…
