Playing a dangerous spy game

IN her 11th novel, “Past Perfect,” bestselling author Susan Isaacs immerses another smart, strong woman in a series of suspenseful, even dangerous scenarios. Nonetheless, her plucky heroine rarely loses her cool, common sense or self-deprecating humor.

“Past Perfect” opens with former CIA analyst Katie Schottland packing to get her 10-year-old son, Nicky, off to a weight-loss camp in Maine. It’s just another boring day for the harried Manhattan mom, who is about to turn 40 and writes a cable TV series called “Spy Guys,” adapted from her novel of the same name.

Just as Katie is trying to go out the door, she gets a distressing call that triggers haunting memories. It’s Lisa Golding, a former CIA colleague with whom she hasn’t spoken in 15 years (and never particularly liked). Lisa pleads for help with “a matter of national importance.” “Your friends at CNN or wherever will owe you forever when you give them this,” says Lisa, a set designer by trade whose agency job was to put together wardrobes and homes for foreign nationals whom she would coach on living in the United States. What’s more, Lisa promises, she’ll tell Katie exactly why she was fired from the CIA so many years ago. They arrange to speak again the next day.

Suddenly, Katie is pulled back into her CIA ways. She’s keeping secrets from Adam, her loving, ever-cheerful husband, who is a veterinary pathologist at the Bronx Zoo. And she feels a pull toward the past she can no longer ignore. She confides to her sister’s gay ex-husband, a swooningly handsome TV film critic, that she hasn’t been able to stop obsessing over being kicked out of the agency. (Her job was hardly a racy espionage gig; she worked in the Office of Eastern European Analysis, writing up economic reports based on her colleagues’ research.) “Every ... time I say to myself, Hey, I’m over it,” she says, “the next thought that instantly pops back into my head is, But seriously, what ... did I do that was so wrong it made them get rid of me like that? It hurts as much now as it did then.”

Then again, she did have an affair with her handsome (and married) boss, Ben Mattingly, 17 years her senior and a notorious cad, who she admits remains inexplicably “hard-wired directly to her heart. The one who could have been.” (As it turns out, she is exceedingly lucky things didn’t work out between them.)

When Katie doesn’t hear from Lisa, she gets worried and is determined to locate her. Digging through old files she’d spirited out of the agency, she comes across cryptic notes about three East Germans, and recalls that she and Lisa had once worked on a report about the Germans’ agents and sources after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. She also knows that three high-level East Germans were relocated to the United States by the agency -- but why? Had they been spying for the Americans? Katie isn’t sure, but she senses this old case might be the key to finding Lisa.

“I had deduced or maybe induced -- having always gotten them mixed up -- that when Lisa called, what she’d wanted from me had something to do with the report I’d written on the three Germans,” Katie thinks. “Yet I had no notion whether this conclusion represented clear thinking on my part or the mushy mentality of someone who earned a living by making up improbable stories and who was desperately looking for answers.”

In fact, Katie tells herself, this could even provide material for her TV series. (She is constantly comparing life with art, and perpetually relearning that life is far messier and considerably more difficult.)

As Katie begins to trace the agency’s dealings back in 1989 when the East German government was collapsing, the plot thickens considerably. There are murders, attempts on lives. When she discovers truths about shady payoffs, she also learns that quite possibly her erstwhile boss and ex-lover is at the center of the intrigue. By the end, it’s all she can do to avoid getting killed.

Despite occasional scenes of domestic life and the running of Katie’s cable TV series, her control freak producer and her overachieving family, this is ultimately a narrative about a quest: one woman’s determination to make peace with her former life (hence the title). There is never any question about whether she will succeed. Yet Isaacs, author of “Any Place I Hang My Hat,” makes the journey diverting enough to hold the reader’s attention. She deftly tosses in a missing person here, a betrayal and dead body there -- and the story moves buoyantly thanks to sharp dialogue, brisk plotting and an eminently likable protagonist.

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Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of six anthologies of poetry, including “Beat Poets.”