NEED TO KNOW

By Karen Cleveland

290 pp. Ballantine. $26.

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While a C.I.A. analyst named Vivian Miller is on the phone assuring her husband, a software engineer, that she can leave Langley to pick up one of their sick kids, she’s also impatiently checking her computer as she downloads a highly classified new counterintelligence program. The couple are in financial straits, and Vivian needs a promotion. Coordinating with the F.B.I., she has designed an algorithm to pinpoint Russian “handlers,” the spies running the spies, a matter of heightened urgency since they’ve recently become more aggressive. Two of her colleagues have already been “pitched,” apparently unsuccessfully. But the danger may lie closer to home: Using the new program, Vivian finds a file on the computer of one suspected handler that contains an unencrypted photo of her own husband. And the information is so secret not even her F.B.I. partner is allowed to see it.

All of this is persuasively conveyed in the opening pages of Cleveland’s novel. And by Page 27, she’s dangling the sort of secret normally reserved for an ending. But instead of easing up, she doubles down. Cleveland has worked for the C.I.A., so the tradecraft in “Need to Know” is of special interest. When penetrating a computer, is an analyst really given a choice between clicking on “active” or “passive,” depending on whether she wants to mess around in there? It’s possible — more likely, certainly, than a set of wedding guests unwittingly divided between C.I.A. operatives and Russian sleeper agents.

“Need to Know” won’t pose any threat to John le Carré because it’s all surfaces. But the surfaces are very shiny and lots of fun.