Spies and Other Gods
James Wolff
Atlantic Crime
April 2026
Spies and Other Gods by James Wolff is a cat and mouse thriller. It is not a James Bond type story but does mix the violence of today’s world with mistrust, lies, and secrets.
Wolff notes the idea for the story, “The germ of the novel is something that really happened. There is a committee called the Intelligence and Security Committee that oversees the work of the British spy agencies. Every year they publish reports and in one, about five years ago, it said the spy agencies that a staff member could complain directly to the committee, outside of the organizations they work for. But the spies blocked this. I started to think what would a number one complaint look like.”
As a former British intelligence officer, the author tries to make the story as authentic as possible. It seems very timely considering what is happening with Iran today, including their killing of an Iranian Olympic wrestler who protested the regime.
“I think I have a good sense of what is realistic and plausible. Having some exposure of what spying is really like has steered me away from gun fights, car chases, and some of the more action depiction of spying. It is much more about psychology than action and physicality.”
The plot has an anonymous whistleblower regarding British intelligence. An assassin, CASPIAN, kills Iranian dissidents across borders in ruthless ways. Aphra McQueen, a researcher with Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, is tasked with digging into the matter brought by an anonymous complaint about the Iranian assassin.
“I wrote her as “a researcher who previously worked for a university in the UK. Then she transferred to work as an investigator for this parliamentary committee. She investigates a whistle blower’s complaint, but she has an ulterior motive and is not fully transparent. When she gets blocked by the spy agencies to find answers, so she goes off on her own.”
“She is tenacious, determined, can find her way around obstacles, has ingenuity and deception. She pulls the wool over the eyes of spies around her for a large portion of the book and her purpose is revealed at a moment of her choosing.”
Sir William Rentoul, the head of British Intelligence, lost his wife a year earlier, and will lose his job in six months due to retirement. Unfortunately, he is also slowly losing his memory.
“I chose him to be the head of British Intelligence with a long career. He is grieving his wife’s recent death and is now worried about a “brain fog.” He is worried he is starting to have dementia. He decides to throw himself into one last investigation to give himself a jolt of energy to stop his decline.”
Aphra has barely begun her investigation when someone tries to sideline her, and she is falsely accused of stealing a top-secret file. She also has an undisclosed personal connection to the investigation.
“Susan represents the type of people not normally seen. She is a building escort, someone who takes trade people, electricians, plumbers, painters, etc, around the building to fix something. Her job is to sit with them to make sure no one wonders off. It is a very humble job. She is very proud of the organization and her role there. She is the first person to detect that Aphra is a threat to the organization and does everything to frustrate her.”
Rentoul and his staff give the appearance of helping Aphra while frustrating and confusing her as much as possible. McQueen is assigned an escort, Susan, who clings to her like Saran Wrap, schedules interviews without allowing her time to prepare for them and gives vague answers to her questions.
Readers realize that the narrator is not directly one of the characters. Wolff notes he did this intentionally, “Bureaucracy can be weaponized and used against people. Governments put it in the way that can change people’s lives. I wanted to get across that it has a violence to it, in the figurative sense. Basically, changing people’s lives for the worse. The idea is how organizations have a character all their own. I think this is something I observed in my career. There is a large identity that is part of the organization itself. I wanted to have a story told by the organization itself. In this book I wanted the organization to be a character that could speak and tell the story, with the narrator British Intelligence, a combination of MI5 and MI6.”
The story does not rely on a lot of action to grab the reader’s attention. There is deception, moral ambiguity, and some chaos to keep people questioning what the characters know and what lies are they telling. The next book, out in the summer of 2027, will show the overlap between journalists and spying. It will relate how spies and reporters do something similar by uncovering information.
