Written by a retired CIA case officer, which shows in the parts that are good and the parts that are not.
The tradecraft is excellent. Surveillance detection runs, recruitment as a slow seduction of someone’s grievances, the bureaucratic knife-fighting back at headquarters. This is a book about the paperwork and patience of intelligence work rather than the chases.
The handling of its protagonist is a weak point and has been widely noted. The author writes her body more often than her mind.
The recipes at the end of each chapter are a genuinely strange choice.
Read April 2022.
