The Good Traitor by Ryan Quinn

Published by Thomas & Mercer on April 5, 2016

Even in the digital age, most novels marketed as being “ripped from the headlines” are stale by the time they are published. Several recent novels have borrowed from the Snowden controversy to build plots around (in the words of a character in The Good Traitor) “courageous people who leak information because ... it is in the public’s interest to know” and the government “cowards who bury their mistakes in secrecy and claims of patriotism.” The Good Traitor backs away from making any bold statements -- it is an action novel, rather than a political novel -- but it builds on some interesting ideas.

The Good Traitor imagines a journalism website -- called Gnos.is -- that writes itself. Computers search the web for information and use algorithms to draw inferences from that information. Other algorithms test the likelihood that the inferences are correct. Some sources contribute to Gnos.is directly but most sources unwittingly contribute information as Gnos.is scrapes data from the internet. When a certain threshold of veracity is reached, the computer labels its conclusions as facts. The computer then publishes the facts as news stories that the computer writes. The point of all this is to eliminate human error and bias from news reporting.

The government hates Gnos.is because it publishes accurate information that the government would like to keep secret. Apparently other people hate Gnos.is (or its reporting) because its unwitting sources contributed to a story about corruption in China. When three of those sources are suddenly murdered by the creative use of technology, the operators of Gnos.is call upon Kera Mersal to help them follow the story. Kera, like one of the Gnos.is founders, is running from the CIA, having been labeled as a traitor because she leaked classified information (which was classified to help the CIA avoid accountability for illegal acts).

The Good Traitor is the kind of novel in which the bad guys can hack computers make airplanes crash and elevators fall. Readers need to suspend their skepticism to enjoy the story. I can do that but I rolled my eyes at a character known as BLACKFISH who roams around China getting into gun battles without being caught.

Other than Gnos.is, which is clever, the rest of the story has been done before -- conflict in the CIA hierarchy, various patriots being framed as traitors, computers turned into assassins. The plot fizzles as it reaches an ending that’s just too easy, given everything that precedes it. The story tries to straddle a line concerning the ethics of revealing improperly classified information, perhaps to avoid angering readers on either side of the debate, but that choice weakens the book. All of those issues make The Good Traitor an imperfect novel, but it’s still a reasonably fun novel. I'd shelve it low on the second tier of spy novels.

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