M.B. Courtenay is the author of the new novel A Spy Inside the Castle. He lives in Morristown, New Jersey.
Q: What inspired you to write A Spy Inside the Castle, and how did you create your character Ethan Briar?
A: I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that history has a hidden layer — the decisions made behind closed doors that quietly change the course of nations. I wanted to write a spy novel that felt rooted in that reality, not in fantasy or spectacle.
A Spy Inside the Castle grew out of that impulse: to explore the unseen world of intelligence, the quiet people who hold enormous power, and the cost of carrying knowledge that others never will.
Ethan Briar came from the question, what happens to a moral person inside a system built on secrecy? He’s capable, loyal, and driven by conscience — but he works in a world that rewards silence and manipulation. That tension between truth and survival became the emotional core of the book.
Q: Did you need to do any research to write the novel, and if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I did an enormous amount of research — not only into intelligence history and modern surveillance technology, but also into philosophy, which shapes the book’s worldview. I read everything from military journals to Henry Kissinger and Tim Weiner, trying to understand how intelligence work evolved from human instinct to data science.
What surprised me most was how much of world history has turned on what we don’t know — moments when incomplete information, misread motives, or a single withheld truth changed the course of events. It made me realize how fragile the concept of “order” really is.
Q: Did you know how the story would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I knew the emotional destination — that Ethan would have to confront the moral cost of understanding too much — but the exact ending changed as the characters deepened. The plot evolved through countless rewrites. Each draft exposed another layer of the labyrinth.
By the time I reached the ending, I finally understood how all the threads connected. My developmental editor loved it, which was a relief. I wanted every character to find a true resolution within “the labyrinth” — something earned and complete. I think readers will feel that sense of closure too.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope readers come away questioning how power truly operates in our world—and how much of what we call “truth” is shaped by unseen hands.
The book isn’t meant to be cynical; it’s meant to be aware. I wanted to write a story that captures both the beauty and the danger of intelligence—not just espionage, but human intelligence, our instinct to understand everything.
With so much focus today on data and artificial prediction, I wanted to ground my protagonist in something technology can’t measure: the moral core of a human being.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m finishing the next book in the series, Ghosts of the Labyrinth (working), which follows Ethan Briar into the aftermath of the events of the first book.
The story moves eastward into the borderlands between war and shadow war — a place where alliances blur and information itself becomes weaponized. It’s darker, more personal, and expands the philosophical thread about how far some will go to control uncertainty.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: A Spy Inside the Castle is, at its heart, a realist thriller — but one that treats intelligence as something larger than politics. It’s about the human condition in a world that’s constantly trying to predict itself.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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