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The Cormorant Hunt: A Novel
Michael Idov
The Cormorant Hunt is a thriller; its setting is the CIA, but it is not about the CIA. That is, it is not a procedural spy novel. The basic structure is that of a James Bond novel: rogue employee of a government organization seeking to save the world from a presumptively evil hidden mastermind. There are many damsels in distress, not all of whom are successfully rescued by the hero.

The Cormorant Hunt arrived in the mid-afternoon post. I read it until dinner time, then picked it up the next morning and read it for the rest of the day. It is fast-paced and engrossing. Especially the second half: one thing happens after another—usually violent, often technical—with subplots embedded in one another like Russian dolls. There are the customary realia of the genre: street addresses; descriptions of rooms, cars and airplanes, injuries and money transfers (there are many references to crypto). Two or three of the characters are developed—“round”—others. and there are many, are simply names and a few adjectives. And there are many high tech toys, the most prominent of which are drones and a slightly more sophisticated version of the Apple Find-My application.

The donnée is that a dossier of an attempt by the CIA to rig a Russian election, and the subsequent murder of several people who knew too much about it, was compiled by a high ranking CIA official, Rex Harlow, who committed suicide. “The Harlow dossier” was taken by a mid-level CIA official, Ari Falk, who gave it to a journalist, Alan Keegan, who published it on an open access site (read Bellingcat). Harlow was replaced as DD/CA (Deputy Director/Covert Activities) by an Asian-American work acholic, Asha Tamaska, who is one of the book’s protagonists, the other being Falk, who has gone into hiding in ex-Soviet Georgia. Keegan is murdered at the opening of the novel. Tamaska wants Falk brought back; brought in, as a traitor.

The first behind-the-scenes mastermind, Felix Burnham, runs an international manosphere pyramid scheme with neo-Nazi connections. Most of the novel concerns Tamaska’s effort to find Falk, then Burnham, and identify the latter as the murderer of Keegan. Behind Burnham and his organization is an elderly, impossibly wealthy man living in Monterey, California, who Falk calls “The Cormorant.” He is a character (like Falk) from Idov’s earlier novel, The Collaborator.

Toward the end, say, the last ten pages, the novel does not slow down; if anything, it speeds up. However, this reader slowed down, re-read that section, put the book down, then picked it up again and re-read that section. It contains an entirely new set of Russian dolls; half a dozen undeveloped subplots. Perhaps Idov had placed material there that will be a connection to the next volume of the advertised third volume of The Cormorant Trilogy. I look forward to reading it.