Crack Shot

For readers of Slow Horses and The Sisters Brothers, a darkly funny debut novel that upends the cloak-and-dagger spy thriller, featuring a teenage girl who witnesses the murder of a secret agent and is marked for death, with explosive Cold War secrets and the family farm on the line.

It’s 1955, and sixteen-year-old Janey Huggins just wants to hunt critters on her remote homestead in rural Iowa. But with her farm on the brink of foreclosure, she is forced to move to the big city—Des Moines—to attend secretarial school to make some money. On the train to her new future, however, a chance encounter ushers Janey to the center of international espionage.

After a mysterious secret agent slips her a hidden object moments before his murder by an armed assassin, Janey becomes the target of a ruthless and bumbling Soviet spy ring convinced she possesses secret information that could help them win the Cold War.

Armed with her wits and the lessons she learned from her late mother, Janey fights her way through cornfields, city streets, and a maze of deception and proves to be surprisingly capable—to everyone’s surprise but her own. As bodies pile up and loyalties blur, Janey must decide where she belongs in a world that doesn’t believe her. She just wants to get home, and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

A taut and gripping blend of coming-of-age grit and Cold War intrigue, Crack Shot is a comic tour de force about survival, identity, and a very dangerous girl.