The Seventh Floor: A Novel

by David McCloskey

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

In a job this unforgiving, friendship can't last. These secret agents have survived the unspeakable together, and now their next targets are each other.

Six CIA officers. Dear friends and cherished enemies. For a quarter century they have stolen other people’s secrets. Now they must steal each other’s.

A Russian arrives in Singapore with a secret to sell. When the Russian is killed and Sam Joseph, the CIA officer dispatched for the meet, goes missing, operational chief Artemis Procter is made a scapegoat for the disaster and run out of the service. Months later, Sam appears at Procter’s doorstep with an explosive secret: there is a Russian mole burrowed deep within the highest ranks of the CIA.

As Procter and Sam investigate, they arrive at a shortlist of suspects made up of both Procter’s closest friends and fiercest enemies. The hunt requires Procter to dredge up her checkered past in the service of the CIA, placing the pair in the sights of a savvy Russian spymaster who will protect Moscow’s mole in Langley at all costs. What happens when friendships forged by sweat and blood—from the Farm to Afghanistan and the executive “Seventh Floor” of CIA’s Langley headquarters—are put to the ultimate test? What can we truly know about the people we love the most?

Taking readers from Langley to Moscow to Paris and beyond, The Seventh Floor explores the nature of friendship in a faithless business, and what it means to love a place that does not love you back.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324086680
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/01/2024
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	8,911
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

David McCloskey is the author of the novels Damascus Station and Moscow X. He’s a former CIA analyst and a former consultant at McKinsey & Company. While at the CIA, he worked in field stations across the Middle East. He lives in Texas.

Editorial Reviews

08/12/2024

Suspicions of a Russian mole circulating in the upper ranks of the CIA lie at the center of McCloskey’s middling sequel to Damascus Station, which reunites former spy Artemis Aphrodite Proctor with her onetime subordinate, Sam Joseph. Proctor, whose impulsive behavior has long alarmed her bosses, has just been fired, in part for engineering a foiled mission that led to Joseph’s capture and torture by the Russians. Now freed in a spy swap but sidelined by the CIA as damaged goods, Joseph approaches Proctor with his worry that a Russian spy has infiltrated the agency’s C-suite. Currently working as a wrangler at an alligator amusement park outside Orlando, Fla., Proctor examines the list of possible moles and agrees to help. Motivated by both patriotism and revenge, Proctor and Joseph set out to unmask the spy in a raucous search that stretches from the Las Vegas Strip to the French countryside. McCloskey, a former CIA analyst, layers the novel with the inside details of tradecraft that only a writer of his background could provide. The plot, however, feels more labored than in previous Proctor adventures, with long, saggy diversions that dilute the suspense. Though not without its charms, this is a marked step down from its predecessors. Agent: Lisa Erbach Vance, Aaron M. Priest Literary. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"David McCloskey has written a colorful, and fantastically clever twenty-first-century version of the classic double agent conundrum, capturing the painful questions of trust and betrayal among lifelong friends."

Anna Pitoniak

"David McCloskey has an uncanny knack for blending humor, intrigue, and authenticity into an espionage whodunit, replete with brilliant tradecraft and twists. Absolutely everything you could want in a spy novel."

I.S. Berry

"A rare combination of experience and talent."

Mick Herron

"[A] gripping, fast-paced plot that includes realistic, cutting-edge tradecraft and action. The Seventh Floor ... will cement McCloskey’s reputation as the best contemporary spy novelist."

General David Petraeus

"The Seventh Floor is a John le Carré-level game of cat and mouse. It could have only been written by someone like David McCloskey, who has an insider’s sharp angle. Read this terrific novel and watch this writer."

David Baldacci