American Spy

About the book

1986, the heart of the Cold War. A young black woman working in an old boys’ club, Marie Mitchell’s FBI career has stalled out and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. Given the opportunity to join a task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes. In the year that follows Marie observes Sankara, seduces him—and has a hand in the coup that will bring him down. But doing so will change everything she believes about what it means to be a spy, a lover, a sister, and a good American.

Readers on Hardcover call it adventurous, tense and mysterious.