"When the MiG-29 swung into view, barely 50 yards portside, passenger Anton Basmanny in seat 12A didn't feel all that surprised. In fact, he even knew the reason it was there. He was the reason.... When you were the Kremlin's least favorite blogger, a lot could happen." Thus opens The Collaborators, a ripping gem of a novel by Michael Idov (Ground Up; Dressed Up for a Riot) that transports readers around the world--Minsk, Moscow, London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Portugal, Morocco, and more--and through a range of geopolitical and interpersonal intrigues. Propulsively paced, and containing as much humor, romance, philosophy, and whimsy as classic spy-thriller action, this brilliant novel will charm readers and linger long after its final pages.

After beginning with the plight of the Kremlin's least favorite blogger on board a troubled flight to Riga, Idov's narrative jumps to an American spy at work in that capital city. "At Yale, from where the CIA recruited him, Ari Falk had been an Army ROTC scholarship student... and a Slavic literature major: half meathead, half egghead. Add a Jewish name, desperate poverty, and tense foster-kid demeanor, and the result was so difficult to parse that most peers gave up without trying." Falk likes Riga, but his job concerns him: he may be a bit too ethical, or even sentimental, for CIA work. "Falk felt like the farmer who adopted a new shelter cat each time a coyote ate the previous one. Once you subtracted the issue of intent, he ran a coyote-feeding program." Falk is looking for Anton Basmanny, who has not arrived as expected.

Pages later, Idov introduces Maya Chou Obrandt, an aspiring actor, daughter to a Taiwanese-American mother and a Russian-American, self-made-billionaire financier father whose death by apparent suicide has just been announced on the news--but with no body, his fate remains unknown. Idle, frustrated, she sets off to search for her missing father. "As long as she was Maya Chou Obrandt, Girl Detective, she wasn't Maya Chou Obrandt the twice-relapsed twenty-three-year-old addict, or Maya Chou Obrandt the corpse." On their separate but intersecting missions, Maya and Falk meet by accident at a marina in Tangier, and team up as an unlikely duo: the disaffected CIA agent and the wayward heiress, who uncover decades-old plots beyond either's imagining.

The Collaborators features short, punchy chunks of narrative switching close-third-person perspectives between a number of characters. Anton, Falk, and Maya are joined by a Russian bagman, a British open-source intelligence innovator with no poker face, and players from various espionage agencies, all lively with idiosyncrasies and multilingual dialog. But all are not what they seem, as identities shift and allegiances come into question: a teenaged Jewish boy at a refugee camp near Rome in the 1980s exhibits commercial acumen that attracts the attention of an American spy; a striking older couple fly business class but are untraceable; Russian agents across history and an aging CIA man intersect in unexpected ways. Not all the characters whom readers will meet, and even like, survive until the novel's end, but Idov makes every loss and gut-punch count. The action opens in 2021, but events appearing as flashbacks from the Cold War through the 1980s and '90s strongly influence that present. Idov spins a complex plot, spanning decades and much of the globe, but it proceeds at a lively pace: beware the late-night binge read.

Idov's many strengths include line-by-line clever riposte ("stop looking at me like I'm a talking dog," Maya tells Falk when the latter is indeed impressed by her reasoning) and the details that make his characters individual and often lovable (a band t-shirt, a love for bad tea). Readers with an interest in the geopolitical intrigue will certainly be drawn in by modern-day plots involving telecommunications, commerce, and machinations of power, but it is equally rewarding to sink into the dramas of love affairs cut short by espionage (one character's sacrifice is labeled Faustian by another who may face a similar choice).

Although it does excel at certain features of the espionage thriller--car chases, shootouts, and double- and triple-crosses--The Collaborators is by no means a book for genre readers alone, or even primarily. There is much to love for anyone who appreciates an engaging story, and despite its plot-related strengths--compelling pacing, adrenaline-charged action sequences--the story at heart is character-driven. Characters espouse thought-provoking philosophies and go to great lengths to navigate romances challenged by international intrigue. Despite the body count, the novel often harbors a lovely, even feel-good tone.

Idov's intelligent, emotive spy novel is funny and sweet, as well as blood-soaked; clever and riveting in its plot twists; and focused on idiosyncratic characters first and foremost. No special expertise in Russian intrigue is required, nor even a special interest in the espionage genre. Brilliant, entertaining, rocketing, and unforgettable, The Collaborators is not to be overlooked. --Julia Kastner

Michael Idov (photo: Ilya Popenko)

Michael Idov is a novelist, director, and screenwriter. A Latvian-born American raised in Riga under Soviet occupation, he moved to New York after graduating from the University of Michigan. Idov has written for New York magazine and has been the editor-in-chief of GQ Russia. He is the author of Ground Up and Dressed Up for a Riot and has worked on film and TV projects including Londongrad, Deutschland 83, Leto, and The Humorist. He and his wife and screenwriting partner, Lily, divide their time between Los Angeles, Berlin, and Portugal. The Collaborators, coming from Scribner on November 19, 2024, is a lightning-paced espionage thriller.

Does this novel fit the spy thriller genre?

I don't think the spy thriller is a genre. I think it's an umbrella milieu, like horror in film. There's something about the clandestine world that works as a device for boiling down the issues that could be tackled in any genre. From le Carré's best novels, basically great literature of British manners, to Mick Herron's social satire, to outright farce and parody, or a post-modernist puzzle box like Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth, my favorite novel of his--the spy thriller novel has room for all of that. My goal was never to transcend or put a gloss or a spin on the thing. I love the thing itself and I wanted to do it justice. Any deviations from the formula are just things that naturally come through, dragged in by my own biography and personality, consciously and unconsciously.

Every genre offers both the writer and the reader enough elasticity that at some point the term becomes meaningless, unless it's a very pure and formulaic example. Which sometimes, when executed well, can also be great. Readers are very savvy. They know the structure. They almost hum along with the melody, even if they're hearing it for the first time. There is a certain pleasure in seeing every beat hit at the right moment in the right manner.

How much research did you do?

I gave myself two rules. Not being a spy, putting as much of myself into it as I could was the best hope for authenticity and verisimilitude for this book. So the rules were: at no point will any scene take place anywhere I haven't lived myself. I wouldn't be describing abstract cities, but specific intersections, streets, cafes. And, at no point will a character speak a language that I don't speak. If I speak it badly, so will they. That's why Maya's French is so shitty, because mine is. There's a sprinkling of Latvian and German, precisely because that's the most I could do for the characters. But when it comes to actual research into the intelligence community--I'm lucky to have a few people in the OSINT world (open source intelligence), and this comes through in the character Alan Keegan. I am fascinated by that world, even more so than the "classic" intelligence agencies. I feel like OSINT is a force for good in the world more often than classic intelligence work.

Some things that may feel like genre inventions are taken directly out of reality. My favorite two examples: the opening is very explicitly based on the Ryanair Incident of 2021, when they called in a fake bomb threat to land a plane over Belarus, in Minsk, and yanked an opposition reporter off the plane and let everyone else go. Which led to Belarus becoming even more of a pariah state, and no international airlines fly over it since then. And the other thing that seems like a complete action-movie moment that's entirely real is, in the fall of 2022 somebody hacked the Russian Uber equivalent, Yandex, and did send like 300 taxis to the same address, creating a traffic snarl that brought the city to a standstill. The moment I read about it, I knew I would use that real event as the climax of a car chase. There's a huge paper trail around that incident, and people are arguing still whether this was the Ukrainians or some sort of harmless prank.

This goes to my general impetus behind the novel itself. Spy novels tend to come in two flavors: realistic and fantastic. I'm very fond of the term spy-fi that people use to describe things like the Mission Impossible movies. There is room for something that is very realistic and researched and true to the underlying geopolitical situation, but at the same time still finds room for a couple of car chases and a shootout. Because these things do happen! To prove that point, I've used the ones that actually have happened.

How do you stay organized for such a complex novel?

Everything has to be plotted out, structurally--as screenwriters rather unpleasantly put it, "beat out" in order to function. I have a 40-page document that's just the chronology, down to the hour of what happens when, and how long it takes every character to move from point A to point B, and what time it is in every time zone. You have to make sure that there are no whoppers, like oh, it's the middle of the night in New York, so you can't describe people going to work. It is a giant Lego set.

That said, I did try to leave room to surprise myself. Oftentimes this happens when you imagine a space in minute detail, and then let your characters go in that space and surprise yourself with what your characters can do there. You build a room and then you make up what happens based on what props you've given the characters. Maybe this is where my movie brain took over. Okay, I have a clear view of this, wouldn't it be cool if X did Y in these rooms.

This novel is expertly paced. What's the secret?

Just being a fan of the genre. Imagining myself as a reader and not wanting to bore myself. When you really feel for these characters, at some point you develop a feel for when things start to drag: I've got maybe two more pages here before something needs to happen--as Raymond Chandler said, when you don't know what to do, have two people burst in with guns. --Julia Kastner