There’s a lot going on in the Spymaster of Baghdad by Margaret Coker. Just by title alone, one expects to read a story of espionage and intrigue as the Iraqi government grapples with both the Sunni-Shia divide and the extremism of Al Qaeda and later the Islamic State that threatens to overrun post Saddam Iraq. What I did not expect was for this story to come wrapped in the more personal stories of two families who had their lives come undone when the Americans invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein. The one thread that bonds the two stories together is sense of honor and shame that affected both families in different ways.

On one side, we have the al-Sudani brothers: Harith-a college dropout and his brother Munaf and on the other side Abrar-a university student from a well-educated family who had done quite well in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In telling the two stories, Coker zeros in on defining incidents of honor and shame that places these figures on these paths. One path leads to a redemption, the other to absolute ruin.

While much of the traditional espionage, good guy/bad guy dynamics are present, Coker is able to go deeper and give the reader a far more nuanced picture of what it means to be a family and have honor which was definitely not the story I was expecting when I requested this title, but that’s a good thing because it made me think deeper about how family/societal pressures can impact the decisions we make.

This book had everything. Margaret Coker really wrote this so that it read more like a novel therefore it was easier to digest and the confusion stayed to a minimum. I feel like the defeat of ISIS is something that was overlooked due to the division here stateside so it was interesting to hear what was going on, as recent as 2019. Definitely a book for anyone interested in military or foreign policy.