Chris Hadfield’s The Defector is a terrific blend of high-speed dogfights, cutthroat espionage, and historical insights into an era that fans of Top Gun will appreciate tremendously. You’ll feel the high-G turns in this thriller as deeply as you’ll feel that gnawing feeling in your stomach when you realize this feels too authentic to be just fiction.
When a state-of-the-art Soviet MiG Foxbat" MiG-25 with superior speed and altitude capabilities makes an emergency landing in Israel at the height of the Yom Kippur War, NASA Flight Controller and former US test pilot Kaz Zemeckis finds himself in a high stakes game of espionage when the Russian pilot wishes to defect to America. Under the guise of communicating details about his training and fighter jet to the Israelis and Americans, he’s planning to enact a sinister mission and it’s one that Kaz must sniff out before the plan comes to fruition.
Hadfield delightfully sets up a slow-burn narrative that takes its sweet time getting to the climax but it never feels like a drag. The story is driven forward through multiple POVs to emphasize a realistic vision of espionage on such a grand scale while seeming so innocuous. The gentle pacing in the middle evokes a sense of uneasiness as to what troubles the final act would bring, and rest assured the final act is an explosive resolution with a beautifully and deeply captivating and satisfying dogfight in high-speed fighter jets. Even with the glimpse of Hadfield’s superior depiction of aerial combat in the superb opening of the book, the finale just took my breath away just like watching a showdown out of Top Gun.
Packed with historical references that further bolster the plausibility of all events that take place in this thriller, The Defector is an intriguing story that reads more like non-fiction in an uber-grounded tone that resonates with reality as we’ve come to read about it.
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