'American Spy' Is A Thrilling Debut With No Simple Answers

About halfway through John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, its wise old hero George Smiley is discussing the inherent paradox of the cover stories that spies adopt. "The more identities a man has," Smiley says, "the more they express the person they conceal."

This fan-dance of identity — with its many concealments and revelations — is central to American Spy, an excitingly sharp debut novel by the talented newcomer Lauren Wilkinson.

Spanning three decades and leapfrogging from New York to the Caribbean to the West African nation of Burkina Faso, this literary thriller leads us into unfamiliar territory. It portrays a little known slice of American interventionism and it shows us the workings of the intelligence community through the eyes of an African-American woman.