The Traitor by Ava Glass

Published by Bantam on September 19, 2023

Emma Makepeace is a predictable spy novel heroine. She volunteers for dangerous assignments, expresses her displeasure when her bosses want her to play it safe, disregards their instructions when she feels she is the only one who can complete the mission, outfights thugs, and exposes the mole. The existence of a mole is one of the plot elements that makes The Traitor predictable, but nothing about the story is fresh.

Emma is in MI6. Despite her success in Alias Emma, she feels her gender is a barrier to the assignments she deserves. She begins the novel by trying to catch a Russian who is laundering money through a British bank. Emma is pulled off that project and tasked with figuring out why a low-level MI6 number cruncher was murdered. The investigation brings her to a Russian oligarch who is suspected of selling chemical weapons. She joins the staff of the oligarch’s yacht with the hope she will find evidence of those sales.

Emma follows the usual path of an undercover agent. She takes risks to search the oligarch’s yacht-office, dodges the suspicions of the oligarch’s security thug, and befriends (uses) the oligarch’s gorgeous, bored, drug-addled girlfriend. The oligarch eventually learns that Emma is a government agent. While MI6 blames that discovery on Emma’s tradecraft, Emma is convinced that someone sold her out to the oligarch. Hence, the obligatory mole.

Later in the novel, Emma befriends (uses) another oligarch’s girlfriend. This oligarch is the boss of the oligarch whose yacht she infiltrated. Emma thinks that surveilling him will let her discover the mole. Well of course it will, and of course Emma’s plan places her in grave danger.

Emma has almost no personality. Her complaints about not being taken seriously because of her gender are at odds with the important assignments she receives. She feels unappreciated because she has sacrificed any semblance of a personal life to serve king and country. Her last relationship fell apart because she couldn’t tell her boyfriend why she was always jetting off without notice. Although she bemoans her fate, Emma manages a spark of romance with another MI6 agent. This leads to cheesy sentences like “With Jon, though, everything felt possible” — sentences that would be at home in a romance novel.

Fortunately, the cheese is not overdone. Unfortunately, the plot — including the identity of the mole — is entirely predictable. Emma outfights large thugs with blows that are only vaguely described and occasionally stabs them with a tiny knife. The plot is mundane, the action is underdeveloped, and the compulsory mole subplot is so obvious that the reader will guess the mole’s identity well before the reveal. Had the mole been anyone else, I might have recommended the novel without reservations. I thought Ava Glass might at least try to surprise the reader, but she makes no effort at all.

While Glass has technical ability as a writer, she fails todeliver the suspense and credible action that spy novels require. The Traitor is at best a time-killer for spy fiction fans who are waiting for a better novel to give them their espionage fix.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS