Who is the best American spy novelist right now? If you had asked me 10 years ago, or 5 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to give you an answer. There were good ones at work, writers I'd read regularly when a new book appeared—Dan Fesperman, for instance, still very much at work, whose latest I reviewed in summer of 2025—but none (in my judgment, at least) who stood out to that degree. Ask me today, though, and I can tell you without hesitation: David McCloskey.
After graduating from Wheaton College, McCloskey spent several years as a CIA analyst, including substantial experience in the Middle East. His novel Damascus Station, exceptionally deft for a debut, was published by W.W. Norton in the fall of 2021; his fifth novel, London Station, just out, establishes him as a grandmaster of the genre.
With the exception of his fourth novel, The Persian, published a year ago, all of McCloskey's books have been set in the same fictional universe, and all of them have featured his most remarkable creation, Artemis Aphrodite Procter, who finds herself—fairly early in the going in this new installment—appointed as CIA station chief in London. Her presence maintains a strong sense of continuity with the earlier books; at the same time, London Station in some ways marks a departure. It is deliberately "overloaded," not simply with more characters, more subplots, and so on, but in the very manner of the narrative.
There is risk in this—a risk of simply "losing" the reader, who will give up on the book. But there are also rewards, for those who stick with it: a readerly excitement that derives not only from the fates of characters, the solutions to puzzles, and so on but also from a sense of immersion in this fictional universe.
Don't get me wrong. This is a spy novel, not an exercise in avant-garde fiction. And side-by-side with the rapid narrative shifts there are lots of set-pieces with a strong element of caricature—all those scenes, for instance, featuring the newly installed head of the CIA, Bobby Jerome, who had been running a home-building company until he was tabbed for this job by the incoming president. To describe Jerome as a "caricature" is insufficient; his character is deliberately off the charts, insufferable in fact (and the reader begins to expect that a severe comeuppance must be in store). Add the comedy that always attends the wildly improbable yet somehow persuasive presence of Procter and you have a mix of ingredients that keep the demands of the many-layered narrative from becoming overwhelming.
Also running through the book is a rueful reflection on the "special relationship" between the United States and (not so) Great Britain, hardly recognizable from what it was in the 1960s. And this is only the most salient of many respects in which London Station pushes us to acknowledge the extent to which our sense of "the way things are" is out of date. Another example would be the increasing clout of private, for-profit intelligence agencies (recruiting people from the CIA, from British intelligence, and so on, offering salaries and perks far beyond what such governmental agencies can sustain).
I haven't yet managed to convey one of the ways in which London Station stands out—McCloskey's ability to include in the same novel scenes that are strikingly different in their emotional register: on one page, a moment of genuine tenderness; on another, 140-proof satire. The last chapter of the book, only two-and-a-half pages, exemplifies this.
Inside the back of the bound galley of London Station that Norton sent, this bit caught my eye: "David McCloskey now has multiple film and television projects of his works under development with Prologue Entertainment, the company behind the 2025 Netflix Thrillers A House of Dynamite and Zero Day. McCloskey will serve as an executive producer on all projects under the deal." Stay tuned.
London Station: A Novel
by David McCloskey
W.W. Norton, 432 pp., $29.99
John Wilson writes about books for First Things, Prufrock News, National Review, and other outlets.
