Whitcoulls Recommends: The Seventh Floor and Total Control

The Seventh Floor by David McCloskey: This is the sequel to the wonderful Moscow X, which we’ve talked about on this show. It brings back the wonderful Artemis Procter, a somewhat unorthodox CIA operational chief who’s spectacularly fired after years of service when a meet up with the Russians goes wrong, and one of her agents is captured. When he reappears with news that someone on the seventh floor – the CIA executive suite – is a Russian mole, they’re determined to root them out but Artemis is persona non grata and the stakes are high. The author’s years of working for the CIA give this real insight and authenticity.

Total Control by David Baldacci. This is actually the second book he ever wrote, reissued now for an audience which may have missed it (which is entirely possible given the man’s prodigious output). It’s about Jason and Sidney – he works for a tech corporation and is up to no good, telling Sidney that he needs to travel to LA for work, but his cover story falls to pieces when the plane he was meant to be on crashes, and she believes he’s died. When he finally makes contact she discovers he’s caught up in a vast work related conspiracy which sends her on the run, desperate for their survival. 

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Ab Joan mackenzie is with me. Now, good morning.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Hello.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
You got two fabulous books this morning. The first one
is by David McCloskey, who, of course we had on
the show earlier today. I've read his book. I love
his writers. He's just got this and as we now know,
you know, he was a CIA analyst, so what he
writes about he knows about. But he really does give

(00:36):
you a sense of the culture at the CIA in
his story.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Yes, he does. It just permeates through. Yeah, this is
the This book I'm going to talk about is called
The Seventh Floor by David McCloskey, and it's actually the
third in his CIA trilogy, which began with a book
called Damascus Road went on with Moscow X, which I've
raved about on this program before, and like Moscow X,
I loved this new one, the seventh Floor, which refers

(01:00):
to the executive suite of top management of the CIA
at Langley, Virginia, and it brings back character who is
a CIA operative. Her name is Artemis Aphrodite Proctor.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
That's a good name.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
It's really good, isn't it. And I will stress that
you don't need to have read the other books in
order to enjoy this one and get to grips with
it very quickly. But Artemis is brought back, and you
can see very early on that she is a real
rogue agent, and at the beginning of the book she
is spectacularly fired from the CIA, and she ends up
going down to Florida and working in alligator wrestling for

(01:33):
tourists on her I think it's her uncle's alligator farm.
But one of the reasons that she was fired was
that she was running a particular operation which went badly wrong,
and one of her agents was taken by the terrorist
organization and kept in captivity for quite some time. And
when he emerged, he knocks on her door and says, look,

(01:53):
I know you're not with the CIA anymore, but I
believe I have good reason to believe there's a mole
on the seventh floor and we should get together and
root that person out and get it sorted. So they
have to operate outside the usual boundaries, and they do,
and it's brilliant.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
You're right, you don't need to have read Moscow X
before you read this but if you love spy thrillers,
do because Artemis Proctor. I can't get enough of it.
She's such a great character.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Anyway, go back and have a listen to our interview
with David McCloskey. If you missed it earlier in the show,
you can find it at Newstalk zb dot co dot
mz ford slash Sunday. Another book that I thoroughly enjoyed
throughout the summer is David Baldacci's Total Control. Another friend
of the show. He was with us a couple of
weeks ago. Yes, he was a great interview.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
Thank you. So this actually is the second book that
David Baldacci ever wrote. He started his career with a
book called Absolute Power, and then he went on and
wrote Total Control. He's done well over fifty books since,
so his output is extraordinary. But I think the publishers
have recognized that there's a whole generation of readers for
his books who've probably missed the earlier ones, and so

(03:03):
they're starting to reissue that back catalog. And this is
really worth the read. It's the story of a guy
called Jason Archer who works for a high tech corporation
in Washington, DC. And he's discovered something nefarious within the
system and is determined to try and take it to
the authorities and see justice done. But he has to

(03:26):
play into the hands of the bad guys in order
to be able to do that. So he books himself
on a flight to LA tells his wife, Sidney, who
is a high flying corporate lawyer, that he's off to LA.
But there's something in the story which means that he
needs to default from that ticket, and he books himself
instead on a flight to Seattle. And while he's merely

(03:46):
on his way to Seattle, the LA flight it blows
up in mid air and one hundred and thirty people die,
including the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and the
FBI agent who is put onto this case to figure
out what happened to the aeroplane. Then chances upon the
fact that our man Jason was in on something, and

(04:07):
so were some other people, and he draws all of
those links together. Meanwhile, of course Sidney, his Jason's wife,
thinks that he's gone down with the plane, so she's
very surprised when she gets a message from him to
say that actually he's alive, if not particularly well.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
There are lots of little different twists and turns in
this book, and different threads that kind of ought to
come together when you least expect it.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
Exactly for a book.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
That's how old.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Wow, I'm going to say it was eighteen.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
I want to say, like, no, it's more.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
It's more. I think he might have written his first
one in about eighty seven.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Okay, it's timeless. Like I read this, I'm going to
be honest, I didn't know it was the second book
and I wrote it, and I was kind of going, oh,
because it talks a bit about AI and I was thinking,
look a I've moved on from that, but still reading it,
it's I found it completely timeless.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Well, it is because it also talks about things like
the impact that the Federal Reserve can have on the
American and international economies. So he brings in quite a
lot of environmental things that give it an added flavor.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
It's very good, No, it's brilliant. So I had two
books today, the Seventh Floor by David McCloskey and Total
Control by David Baldacci. Thank you so much, John, talk
next weeks for you then.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin. Listen
live to News Talks it B from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio