A Loyal Spy

Starred review from December 11, 2017
In Conway’s stunning follow-up to Rage, a mission takes British spy Jonah Said, the son of a Palestinian scientist and an English barrister, to Sierra Leone in 2001. Jonah is investigating terrorists who are attempting to buy $20 million worth of smuggled diamonds; things go awry, and he finds himself held at gunpoint by Nor ed-Din, a spy he thought he killed a number of years before in the Khyber Pass. Jonah parts from Nor, knowing their differences will be settled another day. Years later, when Nor announces in an internet video that he’s planning a spectacular attack, Jonah joins the effort to try to stop him and other terrorists from detonating a sunken WWII ship rigged with explosives in the Thames Estuary. The resulting explosion would create a tsunami that would destroy London. With its complex characters and plot, this thriller feels as if the author has channeled his considerable powers through le Carré by way of Tolstoy, and yet it remains uniquely his own. The final paragraph will give readers hope that they’ll be seeing Jonah again in the future.

January 1, 2018
Jonah Said and Nor ed-Din became best friends on a rugby team in a London suburb. Their paths separated, but in time they met again, as soldier-spies in the global war on terror. But after an attempt to assassinate Bin Laden goes disastrously wrong, Jonah is no longer sure he and Nor are on the same side. A Loyal Spy won the UK's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award in 2010, but it is only now being issued in the U.S. That's surprising because it offers a plausible, insightful, and cynical review of many of most tumultuous and horrific events of the last four decades, spanning the globe from Pakistan to Sierra Leone and Lower Manhattan. Interestingly, the disastrous 2003 U.S. war against Iraq is seen by the Brits as a fait accompli. They know the Bush administration's drumbeat for war will simply magnify the madness. A somewhat over-the-top ending, involving an attack on London, doesn't quite work, but there is much to admire in this thoughtful thriller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)