This is NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Linda Holmes. It makes perfect sense that a former CIA analyst would write spy thrillers, and that's what David McCloskey does. His latest is called the Persian, and it focuses on a surprise attack launched by Israel against Iran. And writing it presented a few challenges. He didn't have time to go back and adjust it so that it would be either more or less like real recent history. And naturally, it had to be reviewed by the real CIA, which gets to decide how much he can say about the spy game and what has to be redacted.

McCloskey told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly that he doesn't always know exactly what he's going

to be allowed to publish.

But when he does get to tell the truth about espionage, it's sometimes plenty wild enough

to be a novel without much invention at all.

A major challenge for writers of espionage fiction is, what happens if your plot gets overtaken by events?

Like, what happens if you write a novel where the villain is Russian and the actions all in Moscow, and in the meantime, war breaks out with China?

And that's where everyone's attention is focused.

Well, our next guest has the opposite problem. David

McCloskey keeps writing spy thrillers and the plots keep coming true. David, welcome back.

So glad to be back. Thanks for having me. I will open by reminding people that in real life, war between Israel and Iran broke out this past summer in June. Israel launched a surprise attack,

assassinated Iranian military leaders and scientists. Your new novel, The Persian, opens with

Israel having just launched a surprise attack and they've just assassinated an Iranian military leader and a scientist.

When did you come up with this story? Well, I came up with this story. When did you come up with this story?

Well, I came up with this story well before the most recent sort of round between Israel and Iran.

And unlike my last novel where I wrote a Russia-focused story basically in the middle of

Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.

This time, I did not have time to go back and change the story.

The book was already written and being printed during the conflict this summer.

But the book really tries to scrape beneath the kind of overt conflict

and get into the heart of the

shadow war between Israel and Iran. Well, I was going to ask you about this because when I last

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