American Spy

Author: Lauren Wilkinson
What does it take to be a good spy, a good lover, and a good American? When Marie Mitchell, an intelligence officer with the FBI, is given a dangerous Cold War mission to seduce Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso known as “Africa’s Che Guevara. she’s drawn into an unexpectedly seductive world. She even begins to admire the man’s Communist ideology which has made him a target for American intervention. Inspired by real events, this espionage thriller ticks all the right boxes, delivering a sexually-charged interrogation of both politics and race. A book of one woman struggles to choose between her honor and her heart in this enthralling espionage drama set against an unforgettable historical backdrop.
Lauren Wilkinson’s new novel, “American Spy,” is extraordinary in a lot of ways, most obviously because it places a female African American intelligence officer, Marie Mitchell, at the center of a Cold War tale of political espionage. But also striking is the novel’s deeper recognition that, to some extent, rudimentary tradecraft is something all of her African American characters have learned as an everyday survival skill.
> Shatabdi Sarker Poushi