Brian Kiteley’s signature lyric sensibility and gift for spring-loaded compression combine perfectly with the crisp exigencies of the classic international spy novel in his newest novel. Taut thriller, tough romance and unambiguous love letter to the southern Mediterranean and the country-sized island of Crete, Jack & Emily is a marvelous book, one that evokes Graham Greene and Len Deighton at their best with just enough Harry Mathews in the mix to keep things sprightly.
—Laird Hunt, the author of Zorrie
Jack & Emily exhilarated me not as a standard spy novel, but in how it subverts the conventions of the spy novel to create a genre all its own—part love story, part examination of U.S. foreign policy prior to 9/11, part meditation on storytelling itself. Maybe “Kiteley” should be CIA lingo for “sly.” Instead of the terse, hardboiled dialogue of action movies, he gives us eloquent exchanges in full, rounded paragraphs. CIA employee Jack is more like a guy you knew in college than, say, Jason Bourne. As for suspense, Kiteley pushes most of the major events off stage, taking us by surprise and forcing us to glean what’s already happened—almost like we’re the true intelligence experts in this thrillingly original novel.
—Clifford Chase, author of Winkie and The Tooth Fairy
Jack & Emily is a clandestine confession, an illumination of difficult encounters that might become the source of both love and regret. Set in the last days of Reagan’s Cold War, and punctuated with sharp, effective flashbacks to the Allies’ covert activity in Greece during World War II, Brian Kiteley’s story immerses us in the shadow world of Jack, a disillusioned CIA operative, and Emily, who is drifting around the Mediterranean and waiting for something to happen. The setting is lush on the page—the breeze off the water, a glass of the local aperitif, the salty tang of the olives on the tongue. Kalyves, both beautiful and dangerous, sets the stage for a relationship and a story driven by familiar juxtaposition. Light and dark. Good and evil. Jack and Emily find each other in moments of shared sensory perception, just large enough to contain a desire for more than what might be possible. Their connection is immediate—evocative in language, passionate in person, but constrained by both Jack’s work and Emily’s family connection to governmental intrigue. Even more than secrecy, the limitations of knowing rest at the heart of these characters’ hopes and their quiet search for not simply answers but purpose.
—Janet Bland, author of A Fish Full of River