Man Man may seem scary to people who walk by with a big bark and his black color, but all he truly wants is to be snuggled up with on the couch, while receiving lots
Dan Fesperman’s new espionage novel,
The Cover Wife, could have been a simplistic experiment in dramatics, maybe even a bit soapy. It follows CIA agent Claire Saylor as she goes undercover as the wife of an academic in Hamburg, Germany, while a parallel plotline follows Mahmoud, a young Moroccan immigrant who’s being slowly sucked in by a radical group of men at his mosque. But Fesperman, a former journalist who covered both the Yugoslav civil wars and the Middle East in the wake of 9/11, roots Claire’s and Mahmoud’s stories firmly in reality.
In this essay, he reveals why an individual spy is far less powerful than you’d think, and why that makes their work all the more thrilling.