Great Reads for Great Readers

 

 

 

 

The Seventh Floor, by David McCloskey.

            

Typically, I have chanced upon #3 in David McCloskey’s series of Spy novels involving various colourful and driven members of the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency – why can’t I ever seem to start at #1!  He writes from experience, having worked for the CIA in another life – he knows how everything functions, especially the hierarchy on the seventh floor, Olympian home of Finn Armitage and Deborah Sweet, brand new leaders eager to make their mark on the organisation, which includes Artemis Proctor, a fearless – and tactless – leader of a subsection. The failure of an exercise against a Russian Source and the disappearance of handler Sam Joseph, captured and held by the Russians for three months until they swapped him for someone they needed more, provided Armitage and Sweet with the ammunition they need to boot her out of the only job she has ever really loved:  without her CIA job she is nothing:  ‘all your life you’re CIA.  Then you’re not.’

Working as an alligator wrangler at her cousin’s Florida theme park is no substitute, and the gators take exception to being rode twice a day;  they bite and will never be her pets.  Is this what her life will be like from now on?

Until Sam Joseph miraculously turns up bringing whiskey – and salvation in the form of explosive secret news that he hasn’t shared with anyone, including the various Psychologists and Medics he has seen since being released:  one of their number on the seventh floor has sold out and is providing the CIA’s most secret knowledge to the Russians.  A mole has been planted and that little critter is flourishing, absolutely bursting with information, and excellent at covering his tracks, having had so much training at doing just that at the CIA.

And how can a disgraced ex- section boss and an ex- undercover spy prisoner have any credibility with a leadership that wanted them gone anyway – no:  they will have to try to unravel and expose the traitor by themselves, the hard way, the dangerous, ‘they could kill-your-ass way.  Which is the only way.

David McCloskey’s superb prose takes no prisoners;  his character—building is second to none and, despite the demise of one of his main protagonists there are still enough great identities for the series to keep going, and going – and going!  Do you hear me, Mr McCloskey?!  SIX STARS.