Ava Glass Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of Alias Emma Books
Alias Emma | (2022) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Traitor | (2023) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Trap | (2024) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Ava Glass
Ava Glass is an ex-civil servant and crime reporter. Her time working for the government introduced her to the world of spies, and she has been fascinated by them ever since.
She worked as a communications consultant, which basically means that she was tasked with trying to convince spies to speak to the public. This wasn’t too popular with the spies themselves, although it meant that she got to spend a bunch of time in that world. There was a lot the spies couldn’t tell her, however what they did share with her was fascinating enough to her that it made her wonder endlessly about all of the things that they could not tell her. With her novel, she was able to imagine what some of these things were.
Before she began writing the novel, she read a lot of spy fiction and continued coming back to Ian Fleming’s work. In the novels, Bond is incredibly skilled, determined, with this dry wit. And even though there is an element of Bondian fantasy to Emma’s ingenuity, she is also a flawed character. When things explode, she does get hurt. And Ava hopes she feels real people, since Emma feels real to Ava.
The seed for “Alias Emma” came to her this one evening when she noticed this CCTV camera mounted and pointed in her direction. When she would move, so would the camera and it tracked her progress until she would turn the corner. Ava has always wondered what would happen if those cameras got hacked by some enemy state.
Her character in “Alias Emma” is based loosely off an actual spy that Ava met while working for the government. This spy was in her twenties yet seemed far older than that. She is still one of the most confident and cool people that Ava’s ever met before. That woman seemed fearless. Ava never questioned this woman’s sudden presence in her life, as she is ridiculously accepting, and Ava happily answered all of her questions regarding Ava’s family and history. And then the woman vanished one day.
All these years have gone by since then, and Ava is still a bit fascinated by the woman. She’s not all that sure that there’d even be an Emma Makepeace without that woman.
Ava knew that this person actually existed, so she thought if she could build a character that was loosely based off of her, then it’d be just inches from reality. And in that way, Ava felt like she could write a spy character that felt genuine to readers even as she did things that most of us could never even imagine doing. If Emma feels like she’s real, it is because reality was her inspiration for the character.
Glass’s favorite character was Martha, who she fell a little in love with. This character is pretty reflective of the spies she met, who were very charming and a great pleasure to spend time with yet who always would reveal so very little of themselves. Charm is an underrated attribute, and she rarely would meet spies that were not charming. Espionage is always this form of seduction, since the more relaxed somebody feels, the more they’ll reveal.
Introducing old school spycraft was at the top of her agenda for this novel. There is something rather exhilarating about the old ways. The in-person and death-defying spy work is the sort of intelligence work Emma does. This is why the agency that she does has no name. It is far too secret to be identified in any kind of way.
Emma may have been born in England, although her roots are Russian. This is something that gives her character a complexity that Ava could play with over the course of the novel: strong yet vulnerable, smart yet prone to taking risks, multilingual, and dedicated to this adopted country of hers.
“Alias Emma” is the first novel in the “Alias Emma” series and was released in 2022. One British spy has been given twelve hours to deliver her asset across London after Russia went and hacked the city’s security cameras. Will she be able to make it without getting spotted, or killed?
There is nothing about Emma Makepeace that’s real. Not even her name. As a newly minted secret agent, she’s barely even graduated from basic training when she gets called in for her first major assignment. Eager to serve her country and prove her worth, she dives right in headfirst.
Emma has to covertly travel across on of the world’s most watched cities in order to bring the reluctant, and handsome, son of Russian dissidents into protective custody, so long as the hitmen from the Motherland do not get to him first. With London’s famous Ring of Steel hacked by the Russian government, the two have to cross the city without getting seen by the hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras which document every single inch of the city’s alleys, streets, and gutters.
Subways, buses, cars, and trains are out of the question, now. Traveling around on foot, and operating without bank cards or phones which could reveal their identity or location, they’ve twelve hours to get to safety. This is going to take all of her skills of subterfuge and disguise. However once Emma’s handler goes dark, there is nobody left to trust. And only one wrong move is going to get them both killed.
This is going to be the longest night of her life.
Readers were blown away by this novel, and hope to see Emma Makepeace in additional novels as this has all the makings of a top tier series. It’s a taut and propulsive thriller with a fantastic lead, and is a classic spy novel written for a modern audience. Fans of the book found themselves riding shotgun along with Emma and lapped up every single spectacular twist and turn. This has a vivid sense of place, some unforgettable characters, some turbo charged pacing, and a premise that feels much too plausible. It’s one of those thrillers that you read in just a day yet you end up remembering for years afterward.
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