The Madness of July

July 14, 2014
Reporter Naughtie (The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency) makes his fiction debut with a nuanced, character-driven spy thriller set over six days in the late 1970s. When a clerk stumbles on a dead American in a House of Parliament cupboard, trouble ensues because on the body are the name and phone number of ex-spy Will Flemyng, now a minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. During a weekend trip to his boyhood home in Scotland, Will meets with his brother Abel Grauber, a U.S. political operative who has taken their mother’s maiden name to distance his career from the careers of Will and their other brother, Mungo, who has unearthed a secret that could rip apart already strained family bonds. Copious amounts of dramatic dialogue speeds the story along. While the plot rambles at times, the slow discovery of who is trying to destroy Will—and why—is irresistible.

August 1, 2014
In his fiction debut, British journalist Naughtie offers a double-twisting spy drama worthy of his countryman le Carre. It's an unseasonably warm July in the 1970s. The USSR lurks malevolently. Politicians need a vacation, but Will Flemyng, a minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, faces two dilemmas: An American espionage agent is discovered dead in a House of Commons storeroom; and Flemyng's older brother, Mungo, has uncovered evidence that their beloved mother had a long-term affair with an American. Once a spy, up-and-comer Flemyng is on the list of possible candidates for the U.S. ambassadorship. The first choice drowned his chance in Courvoisier. There's another problem. A prominent U.S. senator's wife has accused someone on the nominee list of raping her years ago. Naughtie lays down an extraordinarily complex narrative, including another thread involving the U.S.'s discovery that someone on its side has been feeding London secret information. It seems even friends have conflicting interests. In this narrative labyrinth, every page seems to chronicle encounters where one character or another schemes to uncover or hide evidence, all the deviousness pronounced in the right accent. Naughtie has an intimate grip on rural Scotland and London, from parks to private clubs, and his characters fit the archetypes you'd expect to find in their stiff-upper-lip, class-strangled political environment, yet in their travails, they become sympathetic. There's more: A sometimes-estranged third Flemyng brother who chose to take American citizenship has been dispatched to London to help sort out the mess. Naughtie has a gift for colorful phrases-"a winding crocodile of taxis"-and a worldly, perhaps rightfully jaundiced view of the political world he's covered as a journalist-"The more you concentrate on behaving sensibly in politics-rationally-doing the right thing, moving up, the more the rules of the game are bound to make you behave irrationally." An intertwined exploration of love and family loyalty, political ambition and international intrigue.

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October 1, 2014

Unlike thrillers that focus on spycraft, this debut novel from a British political affairs journalist digs into the psychology of secrets hidden in the crevices between diplomacy and espionage. Will Flemyng, a cabinet minister in London, wants only to get out of town on a hot July day in 1976. Suddenly, he glimpses facets of several puzzles. A dead American is found in a closet in the Palace of Westminster, home to Britain's Houses of Parliament. The ambassadorship to Washington, DC, is open, with rabid competition among the candidates. Will and his two brothers, whose hearts are in the Scottish Highlands, learn that their dear mother was not a faithful wife. A rape accusation from two decades ago ripens to vengeance. The pressure builds because Will intuits that these threads are part of a single web. VERDICT Naughtie, whose love of Scotland shines in his lyrical and affectional portrait of the Highlands, writes insightfully about the plight of men at the highest reaches of power when passionate ambitions joust with common sense. Readers on this side of the pond may struggle a bit with elements familiar to a British audience, but perseverance will reward them with the satisfying resolution of a sophisticated conundrum. For mood and atmosphere, Alan Furst's novels come to mind and for tension and pace, think of the British TV series MI-5.--Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2014
Former MI6 operative Will Flemyng has successfully transitioned into a ministerial post in the Foreign Office. He enjoys the game, but it's July, the historically daft season in British politics, and he is unsettled because the shrewdest of his colleagues sense that something disastrous is about to happen. The trouble begins when an American spook is found dead, stuffed into a cupboard in the House of Commons. Worse, he has Will's phone number in his pocket. Will must return to his old craft to protect himself, his party, and the sometimes-shaky special relationship with the Yanks. Although the novel is billed as a thriller, first-novelist Naughtie, a veteran journalist covering British politics, seems determined to obscure the nature of the threat Will faces. Naughtie's tells, the important bits that spur action, often come via snatches of truncated dialogue that offer multiple possible meanings, and the tells may be buried in inside-baseball-style dialogue about arcane government practices. Even well-read Anglophiles will wonder just who is doing what to whom, but many will find the process of sorting it all out well worth the effort.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)