Creation Lake
I honestly don’t even remember why i bought this book on Audible. It must have been some recommendation from the New York Times or some such. Anyhow, I got this in my Audible library and decided to give it a shot.
I want to say I kind of regret reading it, but at the same time, I’m glad that I read it. The premise is that of an undercover agent, whose specialty is to go in and disrupt what government agencies (and sometimes the private sector) has identified to be perhaps disruptive and needs to be shut down.
The protagonist is a pretty amazing person of many talents, pretty enough to be picked up by men, not pretty enough to be noticed by everyone and cause jealousy, multi-lingual, capable of thinking of her feet, and a meticulous planner. She’s no 007, but she’s more the real life type spy that a person needs to be for this line of work.
The story jumps a bit back and forth between her current assignment (for a private sector) and her past assignment (for the government), and….Its mostly boring.
This is probably the typical agent assignment, to be honest. a lot of grunt work, a lot of trying to infiltrate and ingratiate yourself to your assignment, and then reporting as necessary. The stakes are much lower (no narcos, or anti-spy agents here), but the grunt work is probably mostly the same.
Her assignment is to undercover into a potential terrorist cell of what seems to be mostly hippies and farmsteaders, to see if they’re going to muck up the plans to build a dam. Seems super low stakes to me honestly, but not out of the question for some private sectors to try to strong arm a frame job against what they would perceive to be militants. But the action moves so very slowly. Its mostly a philosophy book for much of the book, as you only get the viewpoint of the protagonist, and very little in the way of spycraft is actually being done.
All in all, the story at least wraps up, and you get some closure, but for those looking to get into a day-to-day life of spycraft, you won’t get that. For those who were hoping for a bigger meaning-of-life novel, you won’t get that here either.
What you do get is…I’m really not sure. A post-modern philosophy lesson of what the meaning of life is? Maybe. Not sure. Anyway, I doubt this is going to be the worst book I read this year, and it scares me a little. =)