The Seventh Floor

"It’s different from the others. As David makes clear in the author’s note, Seventh Floor is very much a hat tip to le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy . It’s not a rip-off of Tinker Tailor— it’s an American story, but it also revolves around a mole hunt. It starts in Singapore where it all goes wrong for Sam Joseph, the CIA agent from McCloskey’s first book, Damascus Station . He goes to meet a Russian contact at a casino, is rumbled and gets captured. Artemis Procter, a no-nonsense spy, has been the one constant character in McCloskey’s books. She gets kicked out of the CIA, and becomes the operations director of Gatorville, an alligator farm in Florida. She’s such an interesting character. She’s obviously been around the block. She’s bruised, she’s battered. She takes no crap from anyone, and then she’s wrestling alligators. She’s brought back to find out who the mole is within the CIA. It’s one of half-a-dozen people, and you get to know them. They all grew up together. They trained together at the Farm. McCloskey keeps you guessing. Just as in Tinker Tailor , just like with Philby, this is true betrayal—of not just the country but of true friends. McCloskey is able to build up the friendship side so convincingly that I felt as if I had been betrayed by a close friend. It’s not just five random characters, so when you get that reveal at the end you can really see the toll it has taken. When you’re questioning your friends, when you know one of them has betrayed you, where does loyalty come in? How do you be objective? This book is faster paced than my other suggestions, but it’s not a shoot ‘em up. Yes, there’s action in it. There’s violence. There are also—in a nod to that great TV show, The Americans —two sleeper Russian assassins living in Texas who get called on to kill Artemis Procter. They have been living in the US a long time and no one suspects them. Just as I.S. Berry, in The Peacock and the Sparrow, is very good at describing the expat scene at embassies, through these two assassins we see what life is like in suburban Dallas, going to people’s houses for barbecues. It’s all false and all the while they’re loyal agents to Mother Russia. ‘The seventh floor’ of the title is where the bosses of the CIA sit in Langley, Virginia. You do get some scenes there, but you also get Artemis Procter and her sidekick, Sam Joseph, going to different cities and countries. There’s the stuffiness of CIA headquarters and then you have all the debauchery when they go off to interview a Russian defector with lots of money who is living in Las Vegas. You definitely get a bit of globe-trotting. There’s also tradecraft in it. That’s true of all my choices. Yes, we want to guess where the plot is going and unravel the mystery for ourselves, but we all love a bit of good, believable tradecraft in our spy books. Listen to the Spybrary podcast or join the Spybrary community on Facebook"