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Crime fiction round-up: July 15, 2019
MAT COWARD reviews American Spy, Whisper Network, A Shroud Of Leaves and A Secret Life

SET amid Thomas Sankara’s socialist revolution in Burkina Faso, American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson (Dialogue Books, £14.99) is a most unusual espionage story.

Marie, its heroine, is a rarity — a black woman working in US intelligence in the 1980s. She’s desperate to undertake real work rather than the condescending scraps she’s thrown in the Ivy League world of the Feds and, as a child of the cold war, happy to do her bit against the spectre of communism.

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