Who Is Vera Kelly? (Vera Kelly Series #1)

by Rosalie Knecht

Overview

Winner of the 2021 Edgar Award – G.P. Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards

An NPR Best Book of the Year

"Gripping, subtle, magnificently written." —The New York Times Book Review

"A delectable page-turner . . . Vera Kelly introduces a fascinating new spy to literature’s mystery canon—one we hope sticks around long beyond this snappy, intimate debut." —Entertainment Weekly

New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA.

Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she's forced to take extreme measures to save herself.

An exhilarating page-turner and perceptive coming-of-age story, Who Is Vera Kelly? introduces an original, wry, and whip-smart female spy for the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947793026
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Series:	Vera Kelly Series , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	98,088
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Rosalie Knecht is the author of Who is Vera Kelly?, Vera Kelly is not a Mystery, winner of the Edgar Award, G.P. Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, as well as a Relief Map, and a translation of Aira's The Seamstress and the Wind. She lives in Jersey City, NJ.

Editorial Reviews

…[a] gripping, subtle, magnificently written new spy novel…Knecht is the real deal. She writes beautifully…and lets us grasp in our own time that the C.I.A. will fail its charge as surely as the youth center did. Who is Vera Kelly? Nobody's business, really. This is a cool, strolling boulevardier of a book, worldly, wry, unrushed but never slow, which casts its gaze upon the middle of the last century and forces us to consider how it might be failing us still.

The New York Times Book Review - Charles Finch

04/09/2018
Knecht’s solid second novel (following The Relief Map) opens in 1966, when 25-year-old Vera Kelly is sent to Buenos Aires by the CIA to infiltrate a rumored KGB cell, gladly leaving behind her life in New York. Ever since a falling-out with her abusive mother as a teenager, Vera’s life consists of her work at a radio station and her occasional discreet trips to underground lesbian bars in Greenwich Village. But in Buenos Aires, Vera learns to lead a spy’s double life. Vera’s observations of the politically charged city are straightforward and sharp: “Bars where students liked to go were nearly empty. Plainclothes police lounged conspicuously in the windows.” As Vera consorts undercover with the radical students assumed to be in touch with the Soviets, a military coup and a personal betrayal threaten her work, leaving her with the new task of trying to make it out of Argentina alive. While Vera is a charming narrator, especially among the ranks of spy thriller leads, her work among the radicals is never as gripping as it should be, nor are the flashbacks following her trajectory from reckless teenager to CIA operative. Still, with some suspension of disbelief, this is a promising subversion of the classic espionage novel, one which would lend itself well to a sequel or series to come. (June)

Publishers Weekly

2018-03-20
A young undercover spy is forced to improvise after her handler goes dark during the Argentinian coup in 1966.In 1957, Vera Kelly is a suicidal teenage girl living in Chevy Chase, Maryland, struggling to come to terms with her sexuality; she's sent to juvenile detention after multiple conflicts with her mother. Less than a decade later, she's a 25-year-old CIA agent skilled in electronics, embedded in Buenos Aires during the Cold War. Going undercover as a Canadian student, Kelly befriends a group of young scholars suspected of being KGB agents; she surveils their activities during the day and spends her nights transcribing conversations from inside the Argentinian vice president's office, which is bugged. As the president's tentative grasp on power weakens, Vera makes plans to leave the country as soon as the army takes control of the government. The borders close more quickly than expected, however, and she's forced to go into hiding and hope her cover hasn't been blown. In this novel, a coming-of-age story meets spy thriller, Knecht (Relief Map, 2016) deftly explores how Vera's alienation from her mother and various romantic partners leads to her becoming a CIA recruit and how her self-confidence continues to be both challenged and reaffirmed in Argentina. Knecht's crisp prose moves swiftly as Vera tails suspects and also accommodates moments of increasing self-awareness: "As Gerry had said, if things went bad, I could be killed. And yet, in the place where my fear should have been, there was a blank space. I felt that I had been living for a long time in a place beyond fear, where my life was contingent and didn't amount to much anyway." Throughout the novel, Vera wonders who she will be should she survive this assignment, but even in her deep uncertainty, it's quite clear that she is already the character readers have been waiting for.A riveting, satisfying novel.

Kirkus Reviews