American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

This is a black spy novel and it is great.  Just read it.

The espionage genre remains one of the whitest, least diverse branches of suspense fiction. That’s ironic, because so many great African American narratives have been about “passing,” and living watchfully undercover. This book is extraordinary in a lot of ways — first because it places a female African American intelligence officer, Marie Mitchell, at the center of a Cold War tale of political espionage. But also striking is the novel’s deeper recognition that, to some extent, rudimentary secrecy is something all of her African American characters have learned as an everyday survival skill. As Marie’s father wryly tells her on the day of her graduation from the FBI training academy at Quantico, “I’ve been a spy in this country for as long as I can remember.”

The book jumps around in time and place, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s; from Queens to Martinique to Burkina Faso. At the heart of the story is Marie’s professional romantic encounter, while working as a contractor for the CIA, with the actual historical figure Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary young president of Burkina Faso who is known as “Africa’s Che Guevara.” While Marie’s assignment in Burkina Faso is filled with seduction and double and triple crosses, the most absorbing parts of her story is when she flashes back to her middle-class childhood in Queens and to her time in the 1980s as a special agent.  There is a lot to grok here, and it is so well written that you are propelled through the book to the end.  This is Wilkinson's first novel, and I am already looking forward to her next.