by Tess Gerritsen ★★★★☆
You know that thing that seems to happen every few years in Hollywood, where in the span of a few months 2 or 3 movies come out with almost identical themes? I'm thinking Deep Impact and Armageddon, for example. Well, the world of books is having an "Armageddon Moment" when it comes to spy/detective novels featuring retirement-age main characters. The runaway success of The Thursday Murder Club probably helped plant the seed that badasses in their 60s and 70s make for compelling main characters. That, in turn, probably helped get Killers of a Certain Age off the ground. I liked both of those quite a bit, and so when I read that the plot of The Spy Coast was about "a retired CIA operative in small-town Maine (who) tackles the ghosts of her past in this fresh take on the spy thriller", I couldn't resist seeing how it would compare, even if I rolled my eyes at the "fresh take" characterization.
Our main character in The Spy Coast is Maggie Bird, who has settled down in the small town of Purity, Maine. After an operation went south with devastating consequences for Maggie, she left the CIA and wandered for years, trying to put the pieces of her life back together. When old agency friends reached out to tell her about the small off-the-radar collective they had started -- a group of 4 of them had settled in Maine, and there was a farm on the market that would be the perfect opportunity to make it a quintet of ex-spies -- Maggie decided it might be time to settle.
She's established herself in Maine and grown accustomed to her farm-first life, tending chickens and living quietly, when she returns home one day to find a woman waiting in her kitchen. The woman is with the CIA (ostensibly), but not someone Maggie knows or has heard of. And she has a chilling message: Diana Ward, a former colleague of Maggie's, has lost contact with everyone, and they need Maggie's help finding her. There are two problems: the first is that Maggie hasn't seen Diana in sixteen years, when the last op they worked drove both from the agency; the second is that Maggie would be more than happy if Diana simply turned up dead.
Unfortunately for Maggie, a simple "no" will not suffice, and through a series of events she gets coerced into locating Diana (of course -- otherwise this would be a pretty dull book about chicken farming in Maine). Interspersed with the present day plot are also a series of flashbacks to Maggie's time with the CIA, and specifically to her involvement with what was known as Operation Cyrano, the "op gone bad" that forced her out of the agency.
The story moves along at a steady pace, and while the plot is not a barnburner that will keep you up until the wee hours, it is consistently compelling. The flashbacks are important to set the table for the current conflict, but I actually thought they dominated too much of the story. I'd estimate that fully half of the chapters are flashbacks, which is fine, but they caused too much disruption in the main story and plot for my taste. On a positive note, they did allow Maggie to become a more fully realized character, one who we could see at different stages in her life.
Inevitably, I have to compare this to Killers of a Certain Age, the novel I read this year that it most closely resembles. Given the subject matter (and title), The Spy Coast is surprisingly light on spying. It's more of a mystery with a sprinkling of spycraft versus a story in which a series of spy-related ops are executed, which was more the approach taken in Killers. I preferred the pacing of Killers, but the focus on plot left too many of the characters underdeveloped in that novel; conversely, the multi-stage look at Maggie in the past and present created a more fully realized character in The Spy Coast. If I had to only recommend one, my vote goes to Killers of a Certain Age, but it's pretty close, and I liked The Spy Coast enough that I will likely read the sequel once it's published.