The McKernan Literary Agency & Consultancy Edinburgh

 

  The first review of Washington Shadow, the new spythriller from Aly Monroe.

  From the Guardian, 21 November 2009

  Monroe introduced us to Agent Peter Cotton in her murky debut The Maze of Cadiz. Washington Shadow finds him accompanying John Maynard Keynes on a diplomatic mission to DC. It's 1945 and Truman has called time on lend-lease, leaving Britain in the financial lurch. Keynes has come to beg for money. But Cotton is really investigating the break-up of America's wartime intelligence agency and its implications for the new world order. This is a cerebral, sedately paced novel, necessarily heavy on exposition – in truth a thriller by name rather than nature. But it's wonderfully atmospheric: through Cotton's eyes we see America as a land of plenty where "cheese kept appearing in unexpected places, in blue mottled crumbs beside walnuts, melted on croutons beside cubes of bacon or heaped into stalk-like shavings that turned out to be fat and soft". Excellent.