OUR AMERICAN FRIEND

A journalist gets sucked into the orbit of an enigmatic first lady—and her life will never be the same.

When we first meet Sofie Morse, the protagonist of Pitoniak’s engaging spy novel, she's living in Split, Croatia, and “wondering if [she] had made the worst mistake of [her] life.” Why have Sofie—a journalist who's left her job covering the scandal-ridden first term of President Henry Caine for a midlevel New York newspaper after the brash, self-serving POTUS is elected to a second term—and her lawyer husband, Ben, picked up stakes and moved to a city to which they had no previous ties? Why has a reporter showing up at their door and asking questions struck terror into Sofie’s heart? Over the course of the novel, Pitoniak will gradually unspool Sofie’s story as well as that of President Caine’s Moscow-born, Paris-raised, former-model wife, Lara, the beautiful, stylish, and self-possessed yet maddeningly (to the press and public) elusive first lady who has enlisted Sofie to write her biography. Pitoniak’s characters may sound familiar, but the author takes them in imaginative directions as she explores and expands upon their memories and motives and the moments in which, as they weigh individual sacrifice for greater good, their decisions change the trajectories of their lives. And although the book traffics in espionage-saga tropes—Cold War! Spies! Murder! Clandestine meetings! Secret signals! Hidden drops! The KGB! The CIA! They’re all here!—and Pitoniak ultimately wraps things up perhaps too prettily, it’s fun to pick up the clues and piece together the truth about Lara Caine, Sofie, and those with whom they interact as we toggle between exotic locales—Moscow, Paris, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in addition to Split—and the 1970s and present day.

This lively political thriller mulls love, loyalty, and the rewards of playing the long game.