Cover image of "The Colonel's Mistake," a Middle Eastern spy story

Mark Sava’s long tenure as the CIA Station Chief in oil-rich Azerbaijan has made him one of America’s leading experts on the country’s next-door neighbor, Iran. Now retired but still living in Baku, he is teaching at a local university and working on a book. He can’t help but continue to take a personal interest in the Agency’s operations in the region. When a CIA operations officer operating under non-official cover is picked up by Azeri secret police for murder, he goes on high alert. And when she gets word to him from prison and drags him into the case, he knows the days ahead will be filled with danger. Thus opens The Colonel’s Mistake, a Middle Eastern spy story that’s the first of Dan Mayland’s series of espionage thrillers featuring Mark Sava.

A CIA officer under suspicion

Daria Buckingham has faced suspicion throughout her career in the CIA. She is the daughter of an American and, as her Irani first name suggests, an Iranian mother. Now that suspicion has mushroomed with her arrest for murder. Because the man who died was a former US Deputy Secretary of Defense. Daria was alone with him when he died. And the official who runs all Agency operations in the region is convinced she murdered him. But Mark Sava doesn’t believe it. He knows her well. She had been one of his best operatives. In hope of preventing her murder by the Azeris, he begins to pull strings to secure her release.

The Colonel’s Mistake (Mark Sava #1) by Dan Mayland (2012) 333 pages ★★★★★ 

Aerial view of Baku, Azerbaijan, the setting for this Middle Eastern spy story
Baku, Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea, where much of the action in this novel takes place. Fanciful skyscrapers have gone up there since this photo was taken. Image: Attila Jandi – Dreamstime.com via Britannica

Suspenseful to the last in this Middle Eastern spy story

The Colonel’s Mistake is a complex story that most readers are likely to find not just suspenseful but baffling, too, until its final chapters. The principal players include:

  • the deputy National Security Advisor responsible for affairs in the region
  • the Azeri minister of national security
  • the Iranian general who commands the Presidential Guard
  • rebels fighting the mullahs within Iran
  • a former Navy SEAL now working for hire, and
  • the CIA Division Chief for Middle Eastern and Central Asian Affairs
  • as well as Mark and Daria.

The relationships among these characters only slowly become apparent—and those relationships prove to be the key to understanding the tale. Along the way, however, you’re likely to gain new insight into the politics of the region and the dynamics of power within the upper reaches of the Iranian government.

The latest incarnation of the Great Game

As Mark Sava knows only too well, “people had been killing each other over control of Central Asia and its resources for nearly two hundred years. First it was the British versus the Russians, then it was the Americans versus the Soviets, and now it was a free-for-all, with Russia, China, and the West all clawing at each other’s throats over oil. It was the latest incarnation of the Great Game.”

Keep in mind that this novel appeared in 2012 during Barack Obama’s first term as President of the United States. The Iran Nuclear Deal was sealed in 2015, toward the conclusion of his second term. The events that transpire in this story may seem farfetched but might well have been thought less so then, a decade ago.

However, even then, Dan Mayland had a clear grasp of the challenge facing the United States. “The one constant in Iranian-American relations,” he writes, “was that whenever Washington came up with a plan to gain the upper hand—whether it was installing the Shah, or backing Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq was, or selling the mullahs arms in 1986—it somehow always wound up making things worse.” And this Middle Eastern spy story he wrote is a dramatic example of just how very badly things can go wrong.

Geography of the region

Map of the Caspian Sea region, where this Middle Eastern spy story is set

Americans are famously ignorant of geography, and few regions of the world cause many of us more confusion than the Middle East and particularly the Caucasus on its northern fringe. Despite the long-running US war in Iraq, only a tiny fraction of our citizenry has a clear picture of the relations among Iraq’s neighbors to the north and east, the several nations that hug the shores of the Caspian Sea. Among them are Russia, Iran, and Azerbaijan, three countries that figure prominently in this novel. With the continuing apprehension among US policy-makers toward Iran, it would make sense for all of us to gain a greater grasp of the geographical relationships in the region.

About the author

Image of Dan Mayland, author of this Middle Eastern spy story

Dan Mayland’s author website tells us that he “is the author of the Mark Sava spy series and The Doctor of Aleppo, novels informed by his long love of history and experiences in the Caspian Region and Middle East. While Azerbaijan was a particular focus beginning in 2005, Mayland also conducted research in Iran prior to the 2009 uprising, in Bahrain shortly after the eruption of the Arab Spring, in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge in 2013, on the Turkey-Syria border after the fall of Aleppo, and more recently in refugee camps on the island of Lesbos, Greece.”

In addition to writing novels, Mayland is a geopolitical forecaster. He holds a degree in history from Dartmouth College. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and children.

For more reading     

I’ve also reviewed the second of the four novels in the Mark Sava series: The Leveling (A compelling tale of intrigue in Central Asia).

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