On the eve of her wedding, Anna, beloved by her father and abandoned by her mother, loses her father in a skiing accident. Soon, with the man’s protégé missing, rumors surface that Noel was a spy for the Chinese.

In France for her honeymoon, she meets a stranger who once worked with Noel, a man who shares information about her father. Soon Anna is in search of an elusive truth. But what is the truth, and what will it mean for Anna’s quest to understand her father?

Told in short chapters, the narrative moves along at a brisk pace. Alternately narrated by a CIA college of Noel’s and by Anna herself, this tale of espionage holds a plethora of reflections and reminders of the past, often reading more like a memoir than a spy thriller. Peopled with well-developed characters and filled with unexpected reveals, the mood of the narrative is sure to pull the reader into the telling of the tale. ( )

Red White Blue, (RWB) by Lea Carpenter, is not a typical spy novel. Oh, it has suspense and it focusses on the world through a spy’s eyes, but danger and chase scenes are seriously wanting. RWB is much more in the vein of a le Carré story - exploring the psychology and philosophy of the spy mind. Of course, these traits are exposed by the narrative, but RWB goes one step further and uses the structure of the exposition to bring the issues of uncertainty and trust to the fore. Each chapter is divided into two parts: one is a straight-forward third person limited narrative of the feelings, events and thoughts in the life of the protagonist, Anna, an extremely intelligent young woman (graduated Summa cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa.) The other part of each chapter is a letter or transcript of a recording, a second-person narrative, addressed directly to Anna by her father’s protégé and labelled Q. A. This part relates to Anna the secret story of her father, a CIA espionage chief, about which Anna is clueless.

The mystery at the heart of RWB is the father’s death in an avalanche near his winter home in the Swiss Alps. However, the trail leading to this event is long and circuitous, and as we, the readers, traverse it, we learn from the point of view of two different narrators all about the minds and spirits of four main people - Anna, her father, her mother and the protégé. It is a story that balances on the reliability of the limited viewpoints of the narrators - is what is being presented a riddle or a clue (to the character and to the reader)? Is the narrator missing the forest while describing the trees? What were the motivations for particular choices and actions? Is each person acting, at each instance, on the basis of their own individual ethics and philosophies or are there societal or corporate pressures at play, protocols and documents, testimonies and cultures?

The result of these different narratives and the structure of their presentations is to force the reader into the mindset of a spy, one who must deal with a large set of unknowns and must disentangle the clues from the riddles and try to determine Truth, one who is only gradually able to assign a logical interpretation to a set of events, to winnow the wheat from the chaff. The reader stumbles down blind alleys, retreats, tries to find the right place for each jigsaw piece, and learns along the way some of what it must be like to be a spy. What fun!

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. ( )