AMERICAN SPY

Lauren Wilkinson

One of the enduring pleasures of genre fiction is the occasional appearance of a novel that does more than it says on the tin: a murder mystery that offers genuine social insight, for example, or a thriller that informs as well as entertains. This happens less often than you’d think. More usual is the genre novel offered by a literary heavyweight self-consciously paddling in shallow waters, doing the genre a favor by splashing about in it. They might imagine their heft is adding sparkle to the waves, but all too often there is, as Gertrude Stein said, “no there there.” Just a few borrowed accessories, and a misguided sense of entitlement.

It’s a relief, then, that Lauren Wilkinson’s “American Spy,” while embracing ambitions and concerns that don’t always figure highly in the spy genre, is first and foremost a thriller. Its trigger sends us straight into plot: Marie Mitchell, a young black woman, is confronted in her home one night by an intruder. Dispatching him without undue difficulty, she flees the United States with her 4-year-old twin sons, and then — hiding out at her mother’s home in Martinique — sets about unraveling the complicated back story that produced her present (which, in the novel’s reality, is 1992).

The key to her current situation turns out to be her role, in the 1980s, as an F.B.I. intelligence agent. “Recruiting and running informants was about cultivating their trust,” Marie tells us. “To do that I found it worked best to lie frequently to them.” But like any agent in the field, she’s more lied to than lying: Recruited to an overseas operation, she finds herself the bait in a honey trap intended to remove the charismatic, popular leader of the newborn Burkina Faso, and soon realizes that the United States is interfering in another country’s democratic processes for its own advantage.