The Persian

"Yes! The Persian is a duel between Mossad and Iran’s intelligence and security apparatus, but what McCloskey does particularly well is avoid turning it into a simple good-guys-versus-bad-guys story. When it comes to my love of spy fiction, my favourite spy novels tend to focus on agent handlers and the relationships with their assets/agents. Gifted authors like McCloskey create a realistic yet tense relationship between two parties, each with different aims, both of whom need each other. In this case, our protagonist is a Persian Jew, a dentist living in Sweden who dreams of giving up his practice and moving to sunny California. The agent handler, one Arik Glitzman, is a formidable character and as you can read from this description, he is definitely not a desk jockey: “Glitzman was rather Napoleonic, short and paunchy with a thatch of black hair and a round face bright with a wide smile. There was fun in his eyes and if they had not belonged to a secret servant of the State of Israel, they might have belonged to a magician, or a kindergarten teacher. Nothing in his mouth was really straight; his front teeth, the implants, were blazing white, while the rest were quite stained. I had assumed the implants to be the result of an accident, perhaps a tumble down the stairs, and only later would I learn I was half right: it had been stairs, but he’d been pushed. Also, the stairs had been in Dubai.” But what is very interesting in The Persian is that the agent also becomes the agent handler and is tasked with recruiting an Iranian target: Roya, the wife of a talented Iranian scientist. At the risk of veering into Spoilertown, I shall say no more. “In our frenetic preparations, Glitzman had insisted that Roya should experience an ‘abundance of realness’ in our first hours together. My words were critical. They would be an invitation to betray her country under the blissful ignorance that she was actually serving it. But there also had to be cold, hard facts.” The novel moves fluidly between Israeli operators, Iranian officials, and civilians caught in the middle, and that balance gives it real weight. You feel the paranoia, the moral compromises, and the sheer human cost of intelligence work — not just the tradecraft. It’s tense, often brutal, but also surprisingly reflective. The protagonist is an unusual one in that he is a Stockholm-based Persian Jew who grew up in Sweden. I was fortunate to have lived in Sweden for a few years, so the occasional jab at Swedish society was on point and, to me, very humorous. Not a single true story, but it very clearly draws on McCoskey’s real-world intelligence experience. McCloskey has that rare ability to make spy fiction feel operationally plausible — the way recruitment happens, the motivations of the main players, how cover stories are built, the grinding patience behind long operations, and the ethical grey zones everyone in that world inhabits. The Persian is a novel written by someone who understands not just how espionage works, but how it feels , the waiting, the second-guessing, and the quiet moments where people realise what they’ve traded away to stay in the game. I applaud David for writing a standalone novel rather than the familiar waters of his Artemis Proctor series. Absolutely. The history, the grievances, the cuisine (David’s exotic food references always make me hungry!) the politics, the layers of identity and loyalty all matter, and The Persian leans into that complexity rather than flattening it. What I like most is that you come away feeling you’ve learned something not in a didactic way, but through realistic characters and chilling consequences. If you enjoy spy fiction that focuses on the more realistic spy plot and characters with a moderate splash of action, then McCloskey is fast becoming one of the most reliable names to look out for."