"The Spy Coast"

The Spy Coast by Tess Gerritsen

Amazon First Reads Pick

Pages: 347 Genre: thriller

Rating: 2.5 Stars

The Spy Coast is about Maggie Bird, a 60-year-old who has retired and moved to Maine to live on a farm. It's a big change, especially considering her past as a spy for the American government. After a mission went wrong 16 years ago, she's just trying to get away from it all. And she is, until her past catches up with her. A body shows up in her driveway, and she knows it's a message. While also dealing with the local police chief (or, should I say, Acting Chief), she has to figure out who is trying to contact her and what they want. Thankfully, she does have her friends, who are also all retired spies, ready to help her. Can she protect both her life and the new community she has built for herself?

I wanted to like this book. I saw it as an option for the Amazon First Reads, and I thought it sounded so fun. The idea of this community of retired spies being pulled back into the chaos seemed so clever, and I was really excited to read this book. Unfortunately, The Spy Coast started going downhill really quickly.

It became abundantly clear to me that I was not the target demographic for this book, as apparently one of Maggie's new retired-life hobbies is making a big deal about being old. This would have been fine in theory, but instead it just made every older character really obnoxious. There was this major superiority complex that these people have over "the younger generation" that is completely unearned. There is no proof of younger people being incompetent (quite the opposite, I would argue), so this line of thinking just made the ex-spies seem kind of rude and stuck up. I'm not delusional enough to believe that every book needs to be catered to me and people my age, but there's a difference between not being in the target demographic and a book that would exclusively appeal to people age 60 and up.

The friend group of ex-spies, or The Martini Club as they come to call themselves, weren't as good of a cast as I wanted them to be. Individually they were interesting, and I did find them funny, but they also just didn't make much sense. Similar to their feelings about their ages, I was never clear if they felt as though they were cast out and forgotten in their old age, or if they wanted to live a quiet life outside of their careers. They would do things that very obviously drew suspicion on themselves (which, I will admit, was always funny) and then would emphasize how they needed to keep a low profile and not give themselves away. It reached a point where it felt like the Martini Club should've been a part of a buddy-cop comedy instead of a serious thriller.

Part of what it made it clear that Maggie, in particular, Is Old, was the incredibly outdated feminism. According to this book, misogyny is when women are annoyed by something. The beginning of the book worked so hard to try to convince me that people were being sexist when they just ... weren't. For example, the Acting Police Chief would get annoyed that a male detective was prohibiting her from doing her investigation under the assumption that it was because she was a woman. However, she would also fully acknowledge that the investigation was just out of her jurisdiction. It's not misogynistic for a man to have a higher position in the police force, especially since she also says that she has no interest in pursuing police work outside of their small town. That means it's not misogyny, it's just not your job. The start of The Spy Coast was riddled with examples of "misogyny" that looked exactly like this, which is just such an old way of looking at feminism. "Feminism" is more than just women being as tough and as capable as men, but this book doesn't have a handle on that.

I might be more willing to buy the "feminist" claims of the book if the main characters weren't all repeatedly misogynistic to other characters. I made a note at the worst examples, so these are all real moments from the book. We're meant to take it as an understood fact that a vague figure on security cam footage is a man because they are seen as strong. Maggie relentlessly makes comments about a 15-year-old's body, appearance, and the "unflattering" clothes she wears. She also seems to claim that it's justified for a man to be staring a woman's chest because "she has very nice breasts." This one I can't even summarize, but Maggie outright says "the shelf life of a mistress is limited." The character in question is dating a single man, by the way. Maggie cares so much about appearing hot and desirable that I started to think the book must've been written by a man. These were just some of the constant comments made that felt really gross and proved to me that the author only wants points for writing a character who is One Of The Boys instead of putting in the work to write an empowering female character, which wouldn't have been as much of a problem if she hadn't beat me over the head with how these women defied misogynistic stereotypes. Sorry, but nobody is defying anything. In fact, they're playing very much into an outdated look of what an acceptable "tough" woman is.

There were a lot of other examples of what I'm going to consider "old person ignorance," but they're not as constant. Maggie was overtly fatphobic (particularly to the child, which made me really uncomfortable), and the way the Acting Police Chief talked about her small town made it seem racist despite never mentioning race. Again, it was very clear to me that I'm not the target demographic, as I have a miniscule amount more social awareness than these people.

If Maggie were to read this review, she would tell me that young people just don't get it and are too sensitive. Maybe, but that doesn't make me like it any more.

At this point, you're probably wondering to yourself why I gave the book two whole stars (and then some) if I only have bad things to say about it, and that's fair. But I did enjoy the book in some aspects. When Maggie could get a grip and stop bullying a teenager, I did find her story very compelling. Although I figured out who did it quite quickly, I was intrigued enough to see how it played out. If I could cut all the snark and ridiculous side comments, I would've really enjoyed The Spy Coast. Again, the concept was clever, and I wanted to like it. The actual execution just fell a little flat for me.

I had other issues with the story structure and whatnot, but I'm willing to admit that those would not have bothered me as much if the other issues didn't exist. At a certain point, the characters were getting on my nerves enough that I was looking for other things to complain about. And while this does prove my claim that I would've liked this book a lot better under different narrative choices, it also isn't fair to harp on.

I'm disappointed in this book more than anything. I can't recommend it unless you are 60 years old or older, kind of hate young people, and don't care about consistency in your serious novels. But hey, maybe that totally fits what you're looking for.

Also, if you want to see some of the comments I made while reading this book, you can click here to see them on my Goodreads account. I've never made my notes public before, but it's a quick way to see some of the examples I used here.