The Spy Thriller Enters The Trump Era

Anna Pitoniak plumbs recent history for her latest novel, “Our American Friend”

In Over Coffee, writer, reader, and haphazard reviewer Angela Lashbrook chats with authors about their recent books, and quizzes them on their hot breakfast takes.

How does a person become a spy?

The typical narrative will have you believe it happens through political will — a sort of whistleblower situation. Perhaps a person is professional, recruited in college, trained and mentored in a formal atmosphere. Maybe they were forced into it, a move made from desperation that was never really a choice at all.

Or maybe it’s almost accidental, with one apparently small decision that snowballs until where a person began scarcely resembles where they ended up as they struggle to understand exactly how they landed where they did.

This is a central theme of Anna Pitoniak’s smart, nimble literary thriller Our American Friend. As many great thrillers do, it begins at the end, with a young, apprehensive journalist, Sofie Morse, in hiding in Split, Croatia with her husband. It quickly becomes clear that the reason she’s there has something to do with the First Lady, the Russian-born Lara Caine, who the year previous had invited Sofie to write her biography after her Trump-like husband was elected to a second…