At the White House, a secret phone line can ring at any moment. FBI agent Peter Sutherland, sidelined to the fringes, has spent the past year working the night shift, waiting for a call that may never come. His only task: to answer and pass it along to the right people. When the phone finally rings, and a young woman in mortal danger begs for help, Peter follows his conscience. And just like that, he finds himself caught in a life-threatening conspiracy.
The Night Agent is Impossible to Put Down
It’s rare to come across a book that pulls you in with such ferocity as Matthew Quirk’s spy thriller—at least for the first 80 pages. Quirk sets the stage with an immediate sense of tension, relentless action, and a merciless antagonist, making the pages fly by.
Action, life-or-death stakes, a covert power play inside the White House. Spies operating under the radar. And to top it all off, the Russian GRU makes an appearance—an agency that, compared to them, even the FSB (the successor of the old KGB) seems like a bunch of Girl Scouts. At least, according to Matthew Quirk. And once the GRU shows up, they waste no time hunting down anyone who gets too close to the fire.
That’s about the first 80-100 pages of The Night Agent. If you don’t want to be disappointed, stop reading right there! And that applies to both the book and this review.
Because right around this point, it becomes clear who’s pulling the strings—and with the complete annihilation of the mystery factor, the story becomes half as interesting. No, scratch that—only a quarter as interesting.
The Night Agent is Just Another Generic Thriller
Let’s start with the most important thing: Shoot first, ask questions later is not exactly a winning strategy—especially if you’re trying to extract crucial information from people. But that’s precisely the approach taken by the Russian intelligence agents, led by the feared Dmitri Sokolov.
First, they mow down everyone who possesses the information they’re after. Then, they start tracking down the victims’ relatives, friends, and business associates, hoping that maybe someone else was told the crucial secret before they turned the original sources into Swiss cheese. I’m no intelligence expert, but that doesn’t exactly sound like an efficient method! And when it happens for the second or third time, it’s even less convincing.
But of course, if they didn’t do it this way and instead used old-school methods—like trying to extract the info with pliers or by using a brick (see: Robert Dugoni’s The Last Agent)—then there wouldn’t be much of a story left in The Night Agent.
What Is This Guy Even Doing in the FBI?
Peter Sutherland, the protagonist of The Night Agent, is your classic good guy™. Also, he has a chronic need to prove himself and a full-blown savior complex. Honestly, he should’ve been weeded out during psychological screening. But of course, we know this all stems from his father, whose past with both the FBI and the U.S. government is… problematic, to say the least.
Still, signing up for the FBI knowing the highest position you’ll ever reach is ‘night-shift phone operator’ in some backwater field office in South Dakota? Career suicide. (Okay, technically Peter takes calls that never come in at the White House instead of South Dakota—but that’s pretty much just as miserable. )
And let’s be real—good guys are boring. Period.
The Night Agent is Slightly Ridiculous
It’s never a good sign when an action-packed thriller could be staged as a play with a cast of just 5 or 6 people. That kind of minimalism screams cheap.
In The Night Agent, it’s painfully obvious that every character who appears will inevitably show up again. Often in the most ridiculous ways, resulting in plot twists that reach “jumping the shark” levels—like the uncle’s storyline, which is made even worse by its over-the-top sentimentality.
Matthew Quirk clearly used a brochure designed for elementary school students to get an overview of the U.S. political system while writing The Night Agent.
An Absurd Conspiracy
If it hadn’t been the case, then the grand conspiracy in his book wouldn’t come across as utterly unrealistic nonsense. Furthermore, what Quirk claims about the presidential system—that the American president is just a powerless puppet—has recently been forcefully refuted by the Trump Tornado (which will likely end up sweeping itself away).
The fact that getting too close to Russia’s embrace is deadly is something that everyone in the upper echelons of American politics already knows. If they don’t—no matter how high up they are—they’ll eventually meet the same fate as the conspirators in this book.
However, the idea that the search for the traitors nesting in the West Wing of the White House has to be outsourced to some retirees instead of being handled by the FBI, the NSA, and who knows how many other intelligence agencies is truly mind-boggling stupidity.
But of course, it’s also telling that in the afterword of the book that inspired the ultra-successful Netflix series, Matthew Quirk thanks a bunch of second-rate and/or mediocre thriller writers.
The Night Agent is like Six Days of the Condor’s slightly dim-witted nephew. It starts off at breakneck speed, pulling you in with a thrilling setup—only to slam headfirst into the White House fence… and knock itself out cold.
Rating: 6.9/10
The Night Agent by Matthew Quirk
512 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published in 2019 by William Morrow Paperbacks
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