Her assignment is to seduce the president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, whom she had met previously when he gave a speech to the United Nations. It is this opportunity that leads Marie to accept, and go to Burkina Faso. Ross tells her she will be working with Daniel Slater, the man who had been her sister’s boyfriend, and Marie suspects Slater knows what really happened to Helene. When a CIA officer, Ed Ross, approaches her with an offer of an assignment in Burkina Faso, she accepts, even though she knows she’s been chosen because she’s a black woman. Marie is now an agent for the FBI, but she’s been suspended for a minor offense, while her white male bosses have gotten away with much worse.
The main timeline takes place in 1987 in New York and Burkina Faso. Marie’s efforts to learn the truth behind her sister’s death play an important role in her subsequent actions, and she becomes a spy so she can do what her sister always wanted to do. As it turns out, her sister, Helene, dies in mysterious circumstances. He became a policeman in order to reform the system by working inside it, and Marie often wonders whether she’s doing the same thing. Marie’s father is a fascinating and complex character. In spite of her mother’s abandonment, Marie always turns to her when she’s in trouble. Her reasons for that are revealed throughout the novel. Marie resents her mother for that, even though, in 1992, she is about to do the same thing herself. Her mother abandons her family and goes back to Martinique. Marie and her sister grew up thinking of Communism as the enemy, and this plays an important role as we see how Marie’s views change over the years. This is the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when people were terrified of nuclear war. She hero-worships her older sister Helene, who wants to be a spy. There are flashbacks to Marie’s childhood in New York in the 1960s, which form the book’s second story line.
The other two timelines relate the events that led to the intruder’s being in her house, and the reader gradually finds out why Marie’s life is in danger, and why she has to leave her sons in the care of her mother in Martinique. The book is told in the form of a journal that Marie keeps for her sons, which she means them to read when they’re older.
It begins with the one that is chronologically the latest, in Martinique in 1992, where Marie has to flee with her twin sons after she shoots an intruder in her house. Both her parents’ backgrounds play important roles in the story. Marie’s father is a black policeman from New York, and her mother is a French-speaking Catholic from Martinique, who passed as white when she was growing up. Marie Mitchell is a brilliant FBI agent, but she is constantly being turned down for high-profile assignments because of her race and gender. American Spy is author Lauren Wilkinson’s stunning debut novel: a Cold War thriller with a black woman as the protagonist.
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