Black Bear by Aly Monroe (Fiction and Espionage) 75 : Spybrary

We are thrilled to bring you the second in our series of commentaries on spy novels read by the students of Fiction and Espionage at the University of Edinburgh.

This week the students interview author Aly Monroe about her Peter Cotton novel Black Bear. They also discuss other books in the spy lit landscape.

Author Aly Monroe interview on the Spybrary Spy Podcast

Please do check out the intro to this series to give you some context around what the students were requested to produce for the course.

So what is Black Bear all about?

Sent to Manhattan as part of the British effort to build intelligence into the new United Nations Organization “from the foundations up,” Agent Peter Cotton wakes up in the Ogden Clinic on East 76th Street, a private facility reserved for very special patients and veterans. He is told he was found badly bruised, slumped in a doorway, and that he had been injected with at least three “truth-drugs.”

He is lucky to be alive. Plagued by vertigo, color blindness, and tunnel vision, and unable to be certain what is real and what is hallucinatory, Cotton must piece together what has happened to him, who is responsible, and why. What he discovers is even more unsettling. His biggest uncertainty? Why he has been allowed to live.

The fourth in the series following the fortunes of British spy Peter Cotton as he navigates the treacherous uncertainties of the post-war world—for all fans of John le Carré, Robert Harris, Eric Ambler, and Graham Greene