Blog Archives
Organization and Discipline
A Symphony of Spies follows a brilliant but indiscreet physicist who leaks classified secrets to his inner circle, leaving a sharp-minded analyst to trace the fallout. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
A Symphony of Spies is informed by my undergraduate career at Amherst College and the camaraderie shared among my circle of friends. Each of my classmates was individually brilliant, but not one of them had the expertise in subatomic physics of fictional freshman, Drew Reid.
Drew is compelling precisely because he can’t keep secrets. What interested you about that kind of character?
I am an introvert. The seeming effortlessness of others to percolate through society fascinates me, as do the strategies to communicate that we are less so inclined to use. Drew Reid is desperate to connect with others and mistakes the disclosure of classified secrets for intimacy.
The musical world feels lived-in and specific. How does musicianship mirror espionage in your view, and do you see performance and intelligence work as forms of exposure?
Musicianship and spycraft are forms of art. They both require mammoth amounts of self-discipline in order to yield success. It has long been said that engineers make great musicians because of their sense of organization and discipline. I don’t know that secret agents have ever been subject to a similar survey, but I suspect they would score well with the tools required for musicianship (and I think musicians make great spies).
Will this novel be the start of a series, or are you working on a different story?
I am considering a sequel to Symphony, but I am currently working on sequels to my first novel, BookMarck, and a new epic set in Greece.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
When he confides his classified research to his college roommates, including an accomplished Russian cellist, he exposes them to the threats of espionage.
As CIA analyst Elizabeth Orr races to follow a trail of illicit foreign monies directed to tap loose Drew’s secrets, the lives of all careen towards an inevitable collision.
A Symphony of Spies
A Symphony of Spies is a spy novel with a chamber-piece feel. It moves through interrogations, college rehearsals, intelligence briefings, hockey locker rooms, and private conversations, but it keeps circling the same question: how do ordinary attachments turn people into assets, liabilities, or both? What makes the book distinctive is the way author Thomas R. Boniello fuses espionage with music. The title isn’t decorative. The novel is built like an arrangement, with separate lines introduced, developed, and then braided together until the political and the personal are playing at the same time.
What I liked most is that the book treats spying less as glamour than as contamination. Information leaks through friendship, ambition, boredom, desire, and plain bad judgment. That gives the story a nervous energy, because the danger often comes from people who are not master schemers at all. They’re gifted, impulsive, lonely, or eager to belong.
The strongest thread for me is Elizabeth Orr. She brings a sharp, restless intelligence to the page, and the novel gets a real charge from the fact that her brilliance is inseparable from her recklessness. Her unauthorized algorithm is both plot engine and character study. It turns abstract policy into something immediate and human. Drew Reid is a different kind of risk, almost the mirror image of Beth. He’s dangerous not because he’s cold, but because he’s porous. That contrast gives the novel a lot of its shape. One person can’t stop thinking. Another can’t stop talking. Between them, whole systems start to wobble.
The musical material also gives the book its tone. Boniello clearly knows this world from the inside, and that confidence shows in the rehearsal scenes, the descriptions of instrumental performance, and the way he uses musicianship as a language for discipline, interpretation, and exposure.
A Symphony of Spies is an ambitious, idea-rich espionage novel that’s most alive when it lets intellect, music, and human frailty occupy the same space. It’s interested in tradecraft, but it’s even more interested in people who become entangled in tradecraft before they fully understand the cost. That makes the book feel less like a puzzle box and more like a score being played by talented people under pressure, with every entrance carrying a risk. It’s smart, unusual, and clearly written by someone who cares about both the machinery of spying and the texture of artistic life.
Pages: 354 | ASIN : B0GRB4QTR4
