TO SLAUGHTER A CAMEL

A nurse practitioner is recruited by the CIA to work as a clandestine agent in Hutson’s thriller.

Erika Harder struggles with the leaden weight of lonesomeness—her husband, Gene, has died from lymphoma, and her senescent mother, Teresa, is lost in a fog of mental derangement. Erika throws herself into her work—she’s a nurse practitioner in Oregon— but simply can’t escape the forlorn hole into which she has crawled: “I feel like I’ve been doing a slow burn, for three years, since Gene died. Like nothing I do matters, just going through the motions and nothing I do really counts.” While treating an Iranian patient, she reveals she is capable of speaking Farsi— in fact, she is a prodigious linguist fluent in several languages. This ability draws the attention of Jack Wellesley of the State Department, who recruits her to join the CIA as a civilian contractor, an implausible turn of events artfully made believable by the author. After some training, Erika is dispatched to Madrid on a mission that falls to pieces quickly—a bomb destroys the CIA station, killing seven of her colleagues. She escapes with Guneet Jodal, a translator and seasoned agent, but she isn’t quite sure if he is a true ally or something else… While the novel’s plot is sometimes hampered by cloak-and-dagger cliches—the reader is reminded too many times that nothing is ever what it seems—Hutson has crafted a genuinely unpredictable story brimming with both action and suspense. Erika is a fascinating heroine—emotionally wounded and vulnerable, but also remarkably tough and preternaturally resourceful. That the story on its face is improbable is of no consequence—the narrative is sufficiently riveting to prevent the reader from being bothered by its less believable elements. This is a thoroughly enjoyable novel—exciting, entertaining, and intelligently rendered.

A captivating tale of espionage.