Book Log 2020 #31: American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

An FBI intelligence officer finds herself at loose ends. She's stuck doing paperwork, never getting to join an actual intelligence operation. Being young, Black, and female all count against her with the old, white, and male FBI hierarchy.

Until she gets an offer from the CIA to join the team plotting to overthrow Thomas Sankara, the communist president of Burkina Faso. While she joins the team, she's conflicted in doing so. She's assumes she was asked to join the team based only on being a Black woman, and as someone sympathetic to Sankara's views she's not sure taking him out is the right thing to do. She's also trying to process the death of her sister, and the role her new CIA boss may have had in it.

The book is framed as a letter from the main character to her sons, explaining why their lives have taken particular turns. Doing so requires detours into the 1960s and the 1980s, which help to flesh out the relationship between the main character and her sister and fully detail the plot against Sankara.

There was an actual coup against Sankara, and a Burkinabe court recently found several people guilty of his assassination. As far as I can tell the trial didn't bring up CIA involvement, but given that organization's history of deposing leaders it didn't like, their involvement would not be surprising.

Whether or not the CIA did play a role in the coup, this book paints a realistic, energetic, and highly engaging picture of how they could have. But the strength of the book is in the  main character's personal relationships and actions, which make the story more relatable and memorable.