The Director: A Novel
*Starred Review* Ignatius is now far better known for his novels (including Bloodmoney, 2011) than for his decades of insightful commentary on foreign affairs and the CIA. But his reporting and commentary, as well as his contacts at Foggy Bottom and Langley, always inform his fiction. This time his subject is the CIA and evidence that Agency computers have been hacked. It falls to a CIA director only a week into his tenure to deal with the crisis. Graham Weber has been hired to shake up an institution that has become sclerotic and is still reeling from WikiLeaks and Snowden’s revelations. To confront both crises, Weber turns to the Agency’s top computer savant, who is a former world-class hacker, while he confronts the myriad intrigues and intransigences inside the CIA and the vast national intelligence network. Ignatius is on new ground here. The hacker culture and ethos is an insular world, but he does a fine job in portraying it through the rollicking sketch of Def Con, the annual hacker convention that is a prime intel recruitment site. He’s similarly successful with Morris, the CIA computer savant: Morris is überbrilliant, a bit kinky, and spectacularly devious. Ignatius even effectively outlines a plausible hack that rocks the entire world economy. He’s given readers another compelling and enlightening look at what might happen next month. Must-read twenty-first-century espionage fiction. --Thomas Gaughan