Minotaur
Published May 5, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Kendal Carter has left her past life behind her to be a full-time mother for four-year-old Rosie, living a quiet life in Switzerland until the past intrudes. Someone wants her dead, and as she uses all of her skills as an ex-spy, she manages to escape with her daughter to London, where her former employer Rico has a safe house for her. The only catch is she will have to help train a new agent from Canada as he infiltrates a dodgy tech company.
The home is beautiful, the Canadian is charming, and Rosie can go to a nearby school. What could go wrong? Well…
As Kendal does her best to blend in, making friends with mums at Rosie’s school and joining in on all the unpaid labor mothers are expected to provide, she discovers one of her new friends is married to one of the principles of the dodgy firm. He’s developed a powerful education app that the British government wants to roll out to schools across the country, but all of the data it will collect appears to be set up to fall into the wrong hands. (Think the deepest fears about Chinese ownership of TikTok, but with the app in the hands of every school child.) It’s up to the Canadian newbie to dig into the code and insert a wrench in the works, and if that fails the mission will fall to Kendal – a danger she never signed up for, and a serious risk to little Rosie.
This isn’t James Bond (though there are plenty of gadgets); it isn’t the cynical post-colonial exhaustion of LeCarre, either (though the government is not to be trusted). The true center of the drama is Rosie and her mother’s desperate attempts to do what is best for her. Kendal doesn’t have much of a role model to fall back on – her mother raised her eccentrically, training her to shake off tails, conduct surveillance, wear disguises, and observe everything going on around her with little chance to just be a kid. While her odd upbringing prepared her well for life as a spy-for-hire (she works for a private firm rather than for MI5 or MI6) it didn’t give her much insight on how to provide a child with a nurturing environment. But her commitment to do just that drives the story as much as the spycraft and the plot twists.
Kemp writes with a fresh voice and, while there isn’t much that anchors the world she creates to contemporary geopolitics or to real-life intelligence services, it has its own integrity and a lot of style. Perhaps the real star of I, Spy is Rosie, who is very recognizably a four year old living at the center of her universe, with her mother’s chief concern keeping her happy and safe. It’s a skillful debut and an interesting start to a series.