Several months back, I read The Faithful Spy, the Edgar Award winning debut novel by Alex Berenson, and I have to admit, I was torn. Part of me really liked the book, but another part of me — the part that loves espionage master Frederick Forsythe — couldn’t help but thinking of Forsythe’s 1994 novel The Fist of God and Forsythe’s 2006 novel The Afghan while reading Berenson’s 2006 novel The Faithful Spy. In The Fist of God, a British officer in the Special Air Service named Mike Martin — who grew up in Iraq, looks Middle Eastern and speaks Arabic perfectly — is embedded in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. In The Afghan, Martin is sent into Afghanistan to impersonate an Afghani freedom fighter held in captivity in Guantanamo Bay and infiltrate al Queda. After reading those two spectacular books, I was a bit skeptical about an American farm boy from Montana, named John Wells, who is now a devout Muslim and member of al Queda, in The Faithful Spy. While Forsythe may have done the Arab infiltrator bit a little better, Berenson still delivers. Especially in the scenes in the U.S. as Wells must defend his birth country from terrorists with a similar Muslim devotion. And at the same time, Wells must convince his CIA superiors that he is on their side after all that time in the Middle East. Forsythe is still the best, but for a first novel, Berenson is one to watch.

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