Everybody Wants to Rule the World
'A comic thriller which reads like a mash-up of Elmore Leonard and The Goonies' The Times, Book of the Month
'Brilliantly plotted, with a nice streak of black comedy, a thoroughly enjoyable spy novel' Mail on Sunday, Best New Fiction
It's 1985, what will soon become known at "The Year of the Spy," and fourteen-year-old Peter Bennett is convinced his mom's new boyfriend is a Russian agent.
"Gary" isn't in the phone book, has an unidentifiable European accent, and keeps a gun in the glove box of his convertible Porsche. Peter thinks Gary only wants to get close to his mom because she works at Scientific Atlanta, a lab with big government contracts. But who is going to believe him? He's just a kid into BMX and MTV.
But after another woman who works at the lab is killed, Peter recruits an unlikely pair of allies - a has-been pulp writer named Dennis Hotchner and his drag performer buddy and heavy, Jackie Demure. Both soon become the target of an unhinged Russian hitman (is it Gary? Maybe!) with a serious Phil Collins obsession.
Meanwhile, Sylvia Weaver, a young, Black FBI agent, investigates Scientific Atlanta in the wake of the employee's murder and discovers a nest of Russian spies. Little does she know her investigation is being thwarted by a seriously compromised colleague in Washington, D.C., who is in league with a lovesick, hypochondriac KGB defector who is playing both sides of the Cold War to his benefit.
As Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev prepare for a historic nuclear summit in Geneva, what happens in Atlanta might change the course of the Cold War, the 20th Century, and Peter Bennett's freshman year of high school.