The Expats

Kate Moore lives in DC with her husband and two sons. Her husband is an IT guy who doesn't make a ton of money but they get by.

One night he comes home and tells her that they need to move to Luxembourg for a lucrative job for him. She is caught off guard and suspicious. He convinces her that the job and the move are legit but she's still wary. In order to move, Kate has to leave her own job, with The Company - aka CIA. While she has been with them since before she met her husband he doesn't know who she works for. She decides it'll be easier to quit her job than to cover what she's doing while living in Europe.

As they settle in to their new life in Luxembourg, they are soon befriended by another American couple. Again, Kate starts to suspect something is wrong with this relationship. For a while she tries to dismiss her suspicions thinking her time with The Company have made her paranoid, but too many things seem to confirm her suspicions

Finally she feels she has to go with her gut and check up on her husband and new friends.

I'll stop there so as not to spoil it. I've read a bunch of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum's and it's refreshing to have a female spy be the main character. The book goes back and forth between present day and Kate's past (in part to illustrate the things she did, and the secrets she kept from her husband). Her initial reason for not wanting to question him, is that she's afraid she'll have to come clean about her own past.

It's a fast paced book, with a plausible ending. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys spy novels/mysteries. Unlike Ludlum and Clancy there isn't a lot of technical jargon to prove that the authors did their research, so it's a quick read. While the flashbacks threw me a little in the beginning, but as usual it all
made sense in the end.