Moscow X

"Moscow X starts slowly and then accelerates into a fast-paced thriller. We have the return of Artemis Proctor, who was in Damascus Station. The book opens in a quite dramatic fashion, where she finds herself in a very compromised position. I won’t ruin it for readers, but she’s immediately defrocked and sent back but she wants to get back in the game. They throw her this project, which is an operation of mind games and trickery. It all revolves around Russian money and oligarchs and the West (or the CIA, in this case) trying to come up with a scheme that will have them all stabbing each other in the back and going after each other. So, a very carefully constructed plot by McCloskey. What I particularly like is there are a large number of scenes about horse breeding. One of the Russians involved runs what they call RusFarm near St Petersburg. Then there is a CIA-backed horse farm in Mexico. How much of this is reality or not, we’ll never know. But it’s still fun to imagine that the secret services are putting businesses together as fronts. For the man who runs the farm in Mexico, the CIA recruited his grandfather first and it’s come down through the generations. He’s sent out to Russia with another agent, to RusFarm, to spy on the protagonists there. I know nothing about horses and horse breeding, but what McCloskey was able to do was write about them in a way that was engaging. It reminded me a bit of Ian Fleming. Say the bridge scene in Moonraker . I have never played bridge in my life, but he is able to write about it in a way that, even if you’re not familiar with the game, you can follow the tension of the moment. I thought McCloskey did a really good job on that. Apparently, he researched with horse breeders in Kentucky—maybe that’s why he was able to write about it for the layperson, because he was once one himself. The two main characters in Moscow X are both spies for the CIA and go undercover to RusFarm. There’s one line which shows just how tough it is to be a spy: they’re told, ‘Look, there are going to have cameras in your rooms. You’ve got to pretend to be a couple.’ Which means making love to each other even though they’re not partners. They have to do this. Again, you just scratch your head and think, ‘I could never be a spy!’ It had a different pace . The first half of Moscow X was a bit of a slow burn. There was a lot of set-up, but there was the payoff. I like slow burns. On Spybrary we often joke that the Brits write the best realistic spy novels, but the Americans are really starting to stake their claim. Three of the writers I’ve chosen (Vidich, McCloskey, and Berry) are American. I might offend some Americans, but they are writing in a British style of espionage, where there aren’t the high-speed car chases and the mass deaths: it is more of an intricate, slow burn. It’s interesting to see that, because my analysis of book sales in the US is that shoot-’em-up books sell a lot more. If you’re a writer who wants to make a ton of money writing spy novels, realistic is probably not the way to go. So we’re very lucky that these authors have picked this genre and are doing well in it. We’re blessed to have them. Also, I just like books, and I tend not to look at gender, but we must be honest that in the spy genre the vast majority of authors are men, and the vast majority of heroes are men. So it’s refreshing to see IS Berry come along. There are others, like Alma Katsu, as well. It’s really good to see these authors write about spies, not just because they’re women but because they happen to write bloody good spy novels. Since Adam Brookes’s Night Heron trilogy, not so many. The one that’s always talked about is Charles Cumming’s Typhoon , but that’s from 2008. I do hear on good authority that McCloskey is considering North Korea and China as the setting for a future book, though."