A superb spy thriller set against the Israel Iran conflict, David McCloskey’s latest novel, THE PERSIAN is a palpable, pulsating story that is timely and relevant.
From its shocking, breath-taking opening, to its startling finale, THE PERSIAN plunges the reader into that rarefied realm of state sanctioned subterfuge, morally bankrupt regimes, self-seeking intelligence officers, the pathologically disturbed, the paranoid and the ego-maniacal.
Narrated like a fever dream by Kamran Esfahani, an Iranian Jewish dentist imprisoned in Tehran for espionage, THE PERSIAN is crafted as a confession that careens between Tel Aviv and Tehran, Stockholm and Istanbul, a gripping account of deceit, duplicity and death by drone.
As a prisoner, Kamran is required to recount his recruitment and deployment as a field agent of Mossad’s Caesarea Division, and of the operation that ended in his incarceration, seemingly ad infinitum. It is a groundhog day device designed by his interrogator torturer to grind his psyche and soul to dust but proves counter intuitively cathartic.
“One year after Glitzman’s visit, a Jewish Persian dentist from Stockholm and a disgraced Tehrani doctor were headed to Albania for two weeks training in small arms, surveillance and counter surveillance, agent handling and recruitment, covert communications technology, breaking and entering, and the construction of explosive devices, on the dime of of the spy agency of the State of Israel. Try and tell me the world makes any sense.”
The world makes no sense, with tensions in Tehran and the questionable incursions by Israel of late. Along the corridors of the secret world creeps this inventive work of fiction, shedding some light and revelation onto these shadows where danger, death and love cohabit.
Back story, cover story, real story run in cross wire circuitry through THE PERSIAN, traversing a moral landscape cratered by cesspits yet leavened by love. Kamran is attracted to an idealistic woman widowed by the very organisation he works for. It proves a near fatal attraction fused with self sacrifice.
Interestingly, the Bible story of Joseph and his coat of many colours is a thread that runs though this ingenious book, a subtle plea perhaps that this parable may forge a pathway to peace, that vengeance be vanquished, that the two opposing sides might come to dispel ancient enmity.
Like Jack Beaumont, author of the excellent The Frencman trilogy, David McCloskey is a former intelligence officer. The PERSIAN is a thoroughly absorbing thriller with the author demonstrating the knowledge and imagination to deliver the sheer storytelling that great adventure demands.
THE PERSIAN by David McCloskey is published by Swift Press.
