Marie decides to join the FBI out of college, influenced by her sister's lifelong dream of being a spy.

I'm writing it all down here just in case I'm not around to tell you.'īook Reviews This British Spy Thriller Shows How Thrill-Less Spying Can Be She knows her sons will one day wonder how their mother found herself in this situation the letter is meant to address that: 'I'm writing this to give you honest answers to the questions I hazard to guess you'll ask while you're growing up. After the attack, she whisks the boys away to Martinique, the Caribbean island where her own mother lives. American Spy is a beautifully paced spy thriller as well as a promising debut from a writer who's not content to rely on the settled tropes of any literary genre.Īmerican Spy is framed as a letter from Marie to her young twin sons, who are in the house at the time of their mother's attempted assassination. Her first novel starts off with a literal bang, and never once lets up. There's a struggle Marie ends up with a few broken blood vessels in her cheeks, and the stranger ends up with a bullet in his head.Ĭlearly, Lauren Wilkinson doesn't believe in wasting time. Deciding it's best to be cautious, she grabs her handgun, right before her worst fear is confirmed - a man with a gun enters her bedroom. On the very first page of American Spy, narrator Marie Mitchell, a former FBI agent, hears a noise in her house. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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