A Spy at War by Charles Beaumont

Published by Canelo on March 27, 2025

My favorite spy stories pit British or American spies against Russians. For an obvious reason (his name is Putin), Russians are making a comeback as the favored spy novel villains. The titular war in A Spy at War is between Russia and Ukraine, making this the first spy novel I’ve read that focuses on that conflict.

My favorite spy stories challenge the reader to guess the identity of a double agent or mole. A Spy at War follows that tradition.

Former British spy Simon Sharman now works in the private sector. He fled the UK after a series of “suspicious events” involving a hedge fund manager. Those events were the subject of A Spy Alone, in which Simon investigated Oxford graduates who went on to be influenced by Russian money. Simon has traveled to Ukraine on a fake Italian passport and is posing as a journalist using a fake Polish press card.

Simon is pursuing Chovka Buchayev, the Chechen assassin who killed his business partner, Evie Howard. Simon intends to kill Chovka but other interested parties want Chovka to defect. They regard Simon as the perfect person to recruit him. The story builds tension as Simon approaches the front line with the belief that Chovka wants to meet him. When the mission goes awry, Simon needs to identify the insider who betrayed him.

The plot leads to a tense if predictable scene that forces Simon to choose between using Chovka for his intelligence value or surrendering to his rage and putting an end to Chovka’s life. In a typical American thriller, the protagonist would pull the trigger and be done with it. I always appreciate a good moral dilemma in a spy novel, particularly when characters actually care about morality.

Chovka receives more characterization than is common for a thriller villain. “Chovka was a survivor, not a hero. Survivors figure out which people have power and make themselves useful to those people.” At several moments in the story, Charles Beaumont demonstrates how that attitude shapes Chovka’s life and decisions.

Unlike Chovka, Simon’s decisions are influenced by values other than greed and convenience. Simon is portrayed as a man suffering from burnout, a weariness with the life he has chosen, who nevertheless uses his experience and intellect to assemble clues as he learns more about his former colleagues from Oxford.

When his story isn’t focused on Simon or Chovka, Beaumont treats the reader to dry British humor in his descriptions of bureaucratic meetings where decisions are made or manipulated. Russian assets are working to undermine British support for Ukraine. It takes a couple of sharp women — including Sarah du Cane, an Oxford professor who serves as an advisor to the British government — to thwart him.

The focus on Russia’s attempts to manipulate public and political opinion about Ukraine gives the novel some currency. The novel takes place in 2022, before the recent change of administration in the US, but its reminder that Russian propaganda is a potent tool of war might be even more relevant in 2025. The argument for selling out Ukraine — “Ukraine can’t win so we should let Russia keep the bits it’s already taken” — sounds depressingly familiar. "You don't have the cards" is how Trump put it.

In the novel, Russian propaganda includes a claim that western contributions of money for the war are being skimmed by Ukrainian oligarchs. The rumor is picked up by bloggers and bots, then amplified until it becomes the basis for policy at the hands of the Russian asset in the British government. Again, the discussions seem spot on. Espionage has always relied on disinformation, but social media provides perfect networks to spread lies until they are mistaken for reality. We all know that, but this is one of the best treatments of the subject I’ve seen in a spy novel.

While A Spy Alone isn’t an action novel, characters are often imperiled. The plot moves quickly. The ending is something of a cliffhanger, although it isn’t difficult to guess how the next novel in the trilogy will begin. I could be wrong, but the ambiguous outcome of Simon’s confrontation with Chovka can only go in one direction if Simon still has a story to tell in the last novel of the trilogy.

It might be helpful to read A Spy Alone before reading its sequel. I didn’t. While A Spy at War explains critical events that took place in the earlier novel, I had the sense that I was missing context. Fortunately, any gaps in my understanding of earlier events in Simon’s life did not impair my ability to enjoy this bridge novel in the trilogy.

RECOMMENDED

Twist by Colum McCann

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by ‎ Random House on March 25, 2025

My favorite writers are disproportionately Irish. Colum McCann is high on that list. His prose blends power and lyricism. His books capture larger truths than the small stories he tells.

The character who narrates Twist is a writer. Anthony Fennell tells the reader that after writing two novels he deems “minor successes,” he fell into “a clean, plain silence.” Fennell has become dissatisfied with his life in Dublin. “So much of my recent life had been lived between the lines. All the caution tape. All the average griefs. All the rusty desires.”

Feeling the need to get away, Fennell accepts an assignment to write an article about broken undersea cables. To that end, his editor arranges for him to accompany the crew of a cable repair ship. He travels to South Africa, where he meets John Conway, who leads cable repair missions. Members of Conway’s repair crew tell him that Conway’s biography has unexplained gaps. Intrigued, Fennell wants to learn more about Conway, but Conway is reticent when asked about his past. Fennell uses a phrase from Leonard Cohen to describe him: “Conway had that secret chord — the sort of man who was there and not there at the same time.”

While waiting for a cable to break, Fennell meets Conway’s beautiful partner Zanele, a South African woman who escaped the slums and was educated in the United States. Fennell regards Conway and Zanele as “the South Africa I had wanted to see, a couple crossing the lines, Black and white, the proof of the times, the ancient conventions dissolving.” Before the ship leaves harbor, Zanele departs for London, where she has a part in Waiting for Godot (much to the chagrin of Beckett’s estate, which is enforcing Beckett’s insistence that “the roles in the play were specifically not for women”). Fennell has the sense that something in Conway’s relationship with Zanele is broken but Conway will not speak to Fennell about his personal life until they have been at sea for weeks, when he finally loses patience with Conway's inquisitive nature.

Fennell’s interior voice also frets about his inability to establish a relationship with his “sloe-eyed son.” Fennell hasn’t seen his son, who now lives in Santiago, for five years. For reasons he can’t explain, Fennell denies that he has any children when Zanele asks him about his family. Conway fears that his son feels abandoned, although “his mother had been the one to actually leave, but it certainly felt that I had propelled her.”

Most of the story consists of Fennell’s observation of Conway and speculation about Zanele, mixed with fascinating descriptions of men at work. In addition to learning how undersea cables are repaired, Fennell ponders the international dependence on cables for news and all manner of information, “all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations” — the list of things that travel under the sea continues for most of a page. Fennell develops a sense of wonder about cables and their traffic that a reader might find infectious.

After the groundwork has been laid, Twist takes a twist. All I will say is that Conway disappears, unexpectedly and without warning. Fennell foreshadows an eventful change in Conway’s life when, early in the novel, he explains that he is telling what he knows of Conway’s story to counter the impressions left by “the websites and platforms and rumor mills” that “will create paywalls out of the piles of shredded facts.” Fennell wants to set the record straight, although he can only speculate about Conway’s motivation for actions that earned him a degree of notoriety.

The primary theme of Twist is repair. The story sends its protagonist on a ship that repairs undersea cables, but the journey gives Fennell an opportunity to repair his life. But who is he kidding, he asks himself. “The idea of an actual repair was the sort of soul-destroying bullshit that I needed to strenuously avoid.” At sea, free from the alcohol that usually protects him from the pain of clear thought, Fennell has a chance to consider repairing his own life. What steps he will take, if any, are left for the closing pages.

Conway has a different take on repair. He has come to view repairs as temporary, perhaps pointless. He fixes one cable and another breaks. What good comes from repairing them? He doesn’t feel responsible for the evil that the internet enables, yet he acknowledges that “we’re just putting the ends together so people can ruin one another.”

Conway questions the value of repair when he learns that Zanele has been attacked but is on the mend in England. “Everything gets fixed,” he says, “and we all stay broken.” As Fennell describes Conway’s relationship with Zanele: “They were rupturing. They were part of the broken things. We all are.”

The novel’s secondary theme is turbulence. Heisenberg tried “to mathematically determine the precise transition of a smoothly flowing liquid into a turbulent flow” without much success. The turbulence of life is no more easily explained. “Down below, the turbulence gathered. The Congo had unrecognized depths. All the things we didn’t know. All the things we were doing to ourselves. The manner in which we broke one another.” Conway’s turbulent relationship with Zanele may have been his undoing, the one thing Conway lacked the skill to repair.

Much like Moby-Dick, to which McCann pays tribute, Twist is built upon an ode to the sea. Life originated in hydrothermal vents deep beneath the ocean, but when Fennell comments upon our evolutionary ancestors crawling out of the sea hundreds of millions of years ago, he does so with humility. The sea is our birthplace yet we understand little of its depths. Zanele laments its use as a dumping ground — more destruction that we may never be able to repair.

Apart from its full characters and thought-provoking story, Twist earns my admiration for McCann’s ability to craft honest sentences with the sharpness of daggers. A few of my favorites:

“At a certain stage our aloneness loses its allure.”

“Just because the truth is ignored,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“So much of who we are is who we cannot be.”

“The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.”

“The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while.”

“Few of the stories we have inside ourselves ever get properly spoken.”

I can spend all day reading McCann and never feel that I’ve wasted a moment. Twist is a strong addition to his oeuvre.

RECOMMENDED

"Trap Line" by Timothy Zahn

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on March 25, 2025

“Trap Line” is a short science fiction story. Nearly every sf story of any merit is eventually anthologized, so readers might soon find it in a larger volume if they decide not to invest their money in a relatively short story.

Toby Collier is an engineer. He is employed to send his consciousness (or “astral”) from his body to a clone (or “replicate”) of his body. His current mission is to send his astral to a replicate on a ship that is many light years from Earth. The ship’s transmitter isn’t working. Toby’s job is to fix it, using the replicate’s body, before sending his astral home.

Toby’s astral is captured on his way to the ship. He joins captives belonging to an alien race who call themselves Hyfisk. Despite being nothing more than a disembodied consciousness, Toby can see the alien astrals if he squints just right. They communicate in a common language, or perhaps Toby somehow translates their thoughts into English. Timothy Zahn offers no real explanations for these convenient facts but at least makes clear that they puzzle Toby. In any event, there would be no story if Toby couldn’t chat with the Hyfisk.

Toby learns that members of a third alien species — a family that includes a young daughter — work for the Overmasters. They set trap lines to capture astrals. Their best pay comes from catching Hyfisk. Why the Overmasters want to capture astrals is far from clear (they’ve already learned all they want to know about the Hyfisk), but the family is worried that their standard of living is in decline because they are capturing fewer astrals. The family also worries that a human astral might not be worth much of anything to anyone. Toby sympathizes with his captors, perhaps because worrying about money and trying to shield children from that concern is a very human trait — at least for humans who aren’t born into wealth.

In the grand tradition of science fiction, humans (especially human engineers) are smarter than aliens, so when Toby sets out to escape, the reader knows he has a pretty good chance of success. He does so in a reasonably entertaining way that involves an alien version of a cat. He even takes into account his desire to keep his captors from filing bankruptcy (or whatever aliens do when they go broke).

The story sets up a moral dilemma when Toby has to decide whether to free the Hyfisk. He sets up a test to decide whether they are morally worthy of being rescued. I didn’t buy the test. Neither did I buy Toby’s sympathy for a family that, like human slave traders, think it is okay to earn an income by capturing and imprisoning astrals, but perhaps I am less forgiving than Toby.

The story earns points for its originality. It moves quickly but raises more questions than it answers. Still, it does just enough to provide a measure of entertainment.

RECOMMENDED

Lethal Prey by John Sandford

Published by ‎ G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 25, 2025

Nobody uses humor to soften the drama of crime as effectively as John Sandford. Few other writers have produced a long running series of crime novels with such immensely likable characters. Lethal Prey follows Sandford’s winning formula by mixing drama and humor to tell a good story.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport is the protagonist of the Prey novels. Lucas has a comfortable life thanks to wealth he earned from building and selling a tech business when he was working for Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Lucas left law enforcement to focus on his business but returned to it because he missed chasing bad guys. He often becomes involved in cases at the request of politicians (including the senator who slotted him into his current position), providing him with a shield against bureaucrats.

Lucas’ friend Virgil Flowers has his own series, but the two often team up for the reader’s pleasure. Virgil works for BCA but has published three novels and is working on his fourth during Lethal Prey. Virgil hopes he can quit BCA and make writing a fulltime career.

As he often does, Sandford begins the novel by showing the reader a crime as it unfolds. Lethal Prey isn’t a whodunit from the reader’s perspective because we see Amanda Fisk fly into a rage and murder a young woman who was shagging her boyfriend. The reader soon learns that Fisk is a psychopath. Through a combination of luck and smarts, she managed to conceal her involvement in the murder. It has gone unsolved for two decades.

The murder victim, Doris Grandfelt, was working as a clerk in an accounting firm where Fisk also worked. Fisk’s soon-to-be husband, Timothy Carlson, was a client of the firm. Timothy did the deed with Doris after business hours on a couch in the accounting offices. Using a table knife from the company cafeteria that she sharpened against a brick wall, Fisk stabbed Doris to death after Timothy left, then buried her body in a wooded park near her childhood home.

Twenty-one years later, Doris’ twin sister, Lara Grandfelt, decides to spend her fortune to reopen the case and find her sister’s killer. Lara is a significant donor to a senator’s political campaign. The senator happens to be Lucas’ benefactor. He pulls strings to make Lucas part of the renewed investigation. Virgil joins the team with the hope that he’ll avoid the daily drudge of his BCA duties and devote more time to his novel.

Sandford often grounds his novels in current events or social trends. Lethal Prey focuses on true crime blogs and podcasts. To bring fresh eyes and extra manpower to the investigation, Lara invites the true crime community to compete for a large reward. The results are hilarious. Much of the novel’s comedy comes from true crime podcasters competing with other, not just to win the reward, but to be first to break each new clue and thus attract more clicks to their websites.

Lucas and Virgil cringe at the thought of involving amateurs in the investigation. As Lucas explains with tongue embedded in cheek:

“Every one of them has a website and they live on clicks and followers. If they get enough clicks, they can get ads from true crime publishers. Some of them probably make upwards of eight hundred dollars a year.”

The real cops nevertheless take advantage of crowdsourcing resources. For example, they provide old photos recovered from Lara’s camera to be posted on the websites with the hope that viewers will identify men who might have known (or slept with) Doris twenty years earlier. The true crime bloggers turn out to be useful when they aren’t fighting with each other.

Following their usual pattern, Lucas and Virgil leave the pavement pounding to officers with less seniority while they analyze the evidence and identify the important interviews that they should do themselves. Fisk is now a prosecutor and thus knows how criminals get caught, so she takes care to get rid of evidence that Lucas, Virgil, and the bloggers might find as they revitalize the investigation. A couple more murders ensue as she covers her tracks. She also targets Virgil in an effort to distract hiim from the investigation.

Fisk makes mistakes in judgment along the way. Will Lucas and Virgil puzzle out the small clues she leaves behind? While series fans will know the answer to that one, the process of detection is the most entertaining feature of these novels — apart from the snarky dialog.

The Prey series is remarkable for its steadiness. Every novel seems fresh. While the personalities of its main characters are familiar to fans of the series, each book allows the characters to grow a bit. Sandford finds the right balance of credible storytelling and atmosphere as his characters roam around Minnesota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin. Collateral characters display the eccentricities of people who live in that part of the Midwest without mocking them. Lethal Prey won’t disappoint series fans and, since each novel stands alone, new readers can pick it up without worrying that they’ve missed too much background to understand the story.

RECOMMENDED

The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi

Published by Orbit on March 18, 2025

Time travel stories can be fun but doing them right can be tricky. Authors usually take note of the paradox — kill your grandfather in the past and you never come into existence and thus can’t travel to the past to kill your grandfather — but they don’t always address it effectively. One approach is to avoid the paradox by traveling to the future. Another is to travel observationally, watching the past through a lens without interacting with it and thus avoiding changes. Another is to travel to the past with the intent to change nothing, usually followed by a mishap that changes everything. Another is to have the traveler change something that doesn’t prevent her birth and then returning to the past to undo the change. Another is to assume the existence of multiple time streams, so that changing the past either shifts the observed reality into a different stream or begins a new one. Perhaps because The Third Rule of Time Travel incorporates all these approaches to varying degrees, it fails to tell a convincing story.

Beth Darlow and her husband Colson invented a time travel machine. The device opens a wormhole that transports the traveler’s mind into her body at an earlier time. The two minds cohabit in the traveler’s past body although (for reasons left unexplained) the past mind doesn’t seem to recall the visit from future self after the experience ends. The mind transported from the present, on the other hand, is aware of the past mind and recalls what she observed through her past self’s eyes. The only physical evidence that two minds are sharing a body is a whitening of the eyes in the traveler’s body while it’s inhabited.

The travel ends after ninety seconds. A skeptic might think that the machine is merely stimulating memories and not transporting the traveler, but evidence (other than the temporary change of eye color) eventually emerges to suggest that a mostly useless form of time travel has actually occurred.

Colson died in a car crash, leaving Beth to further the research and to replace him as the time traveler. Beth is trying to understand how the time machine chooses arrival points. She thinks that directing time travel to a specific date will make the machine more useful, but the traveler will still observe only the things she has already seen. I can imagine some scenarios where that might be helpful (a crime victim who can’t identify an assailant might notice more details when revisiting the assault), but a lot of money is being invested in technology that hardly seems to justify the cost.

The research is funded by a creep who wants profitable results. His efforts to attract new investors cause Beth to take risks. This leads to an inevitable confrontation between the investor, who believes he has exclusive rights to the invention, and Beth, who is one of the few people who understand how the contraption works. It turns out that her understanding is less than complete.

When Beth begins traveling, she notices that the machine always sends her back to traumatic moments in her life, including identifying her husband’s body in the morgue. Beth eventually realizes why that’s happening, but the explanation [spoiler alert] amounts to “the universe doesn’t like to be messed with.” Nonsense of that sort bleeds the science out of science fiction.

Beth begins to see the ghost of her dead husband. Then she changes the past in a way I won’t spoil. How she does that is never made clear, a startling omission since one of the titular rules is that travelers can’t interact with the past and thus can’t change it. I guess we’re supposed to accept the theory that observing a quantum system causes it to change, but the application of that theory to the plot is disappointingly fuzzy.

Beth only knows the past was changed because, before she travels, she sends answers to certain questions to an off-planet location where they won’t be affected by any changes to Earth history. (This has something to do with the inverse square law and the assumption that the machine’s energy pulse will lose its energy as it travels away from the Earth, leaving the pre-recorded answers invulnerable to change.) The story’s tense moments result from Beth’s desire to undo the changes she made and the owner’s desire to stop her from revealing the harm that his useless but expensive technology might cause.

The setup is interesting even if Beth isn’t. The story’s resolution combines metaphysical gibberish with simplistic pseudoscience. Now, there’s so much we don’t understand about the universe that maybe Philip Fracassi got it right, but other writers have made a more convincing case [second spoiler alert] that time is an illusion, that there is only the now, and that the now encompasses all possible pasts and futures. This convenient theory empowers Beth to construct the reality she wants and thus enables a happy ending, but science fiction’s demand that readers suspend their disbelief needs to be supported by a plausible reason to do so. Metaphysical gibberish about an angry universe and simplistic pseudoscience didn’t get me there, particularly when the ending doesn’t address the many ramifications of the story’s underlying theory.

That leaves us with a conventional thriller — a race to save the present by undoing changes to the past — surrounded by the trappings of science fiction. This science fiction thriller is more effective as a thriller than as science fiction, but the thriller aspects are unoriginal. Thriller fans might nevertheless enjoy it. Hardcore sf fans, not so much.

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