It’s 1985, and the Cold War is still going strong when an unexpected visitor shows up at the front gates of the American embassy in Rome. The cantankerous older man identifies himself as Vitaly Yurchenko, the deputy director of the KGB’s First Directorate. Yurchenko declares that he wants to defect.
Once the embassy employees recover from their shock, the federal agencies involved are practically giddy over the potential intelligence they might learn from this out-of-the-blue gift. They hope to gain information on a long list of topics: missile defense, surveillance operations, and undercover Soviet agents who might be working within American borders.
As it happens, that last subject is of particular interest to several people living across the ocean in Atlanta, Georgia. They’re all about to become entangled in a gritty spy story that gets deadlier by the day in Ace Atkin’s latest novel, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
Web of Intrigue
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” features a large cast of memorable, deliciously flawed characters.
Peter Bennett is a somewhat typical 14-year-old kid living in Atlanta. He’s sullen, has a pigsty of a bedroom, and is quickly becoming disillusioned with his life. His mother, Connie, has a new boyfriend named Gary Powers, who has a strange European accent, a loaded gun in his car’s glove compartment, and a cassette tape of Soviet military music.
Peter, a fan of true crime magazines, . suspects that Gary is a KGB spy who’s only dating his mom because she works at a cutting-edge satellite design company.
Peter tracks down Dennis X. Hotchner, a washed-up, hard-boiled mystery novelist. He spends his evenings drinking gin martinis with his unlikely friend Jackie Demure, a former football player turned drag performer. Peter is a big fan of Dennis’s writing and is desperate for help to revealing Gary’s true motives.
Dennis wasn’t born yesterday, so he dismisses the kid’s theory as nonsense. Then, an unexpected event prompts Jackie to push his friend to look into it.
Meanwhile, an older, married man named Dan Rafferty is spending a lot of time with a stripper named Wanda (a.k.a. Miss Trinity Velvet). Dan has been treating her as a “Pygmalion” project and involving her in elaborate spy role-playing games. He provides her with cash in exchange for her participation in these “missions.” Wanda also hopes he can help her deal with her abusive ex.
Dan is, in fact, an FBI agent who becomes part of the debriefing and interrogation of the surprise Russian defector, Vitaly Yurchenko. However, Dan’s secret relationship with Wanda (affair? project? mentorship?) might end up complicating this assignment and possibly ruining his life.
We also have Lisica, a high-level KGB assassin, skilled in seduction and violence; she’s spent 20 years in America and has developed a mild obsession with the singer Phil Collins. Currently, she’s been cultivating an asset who’s a secretary at a satellite tech company.
Finally, Sylvia Weaver is a rookie FBI agent on the counterintelligence squad. She’s been working on a former KKK “wizard” turned Pentecostal preacher whom she hopes to flip as an informant. However, she’s pulled off that project to investigate a major crime linked to a certain satellite company.
Got that all straight? There’ll be a test later.
Muddled but Fun
American crime novelist Ace Atkins is best known for Southern noir fiction, a bit of a throwback in this world of “safe spaces” and “microaggressions.” While frequently using expletives is usually a sign of hack writing, Atkins is one of those writers who can wield vulgar language like a virtuoso, using it to add a definitive layer of realism that his characters would be left wanting without.
As for his style, he loves lean prose and hard-boiled, morally–driven protagonists who treat violence like a carpenter treats a hammer: It’s just one of the tools of the trade. Like many old-school noir novelists, he often features themes of corruption, power, and consequence.
As you can imagine, there are several backstories and character threads to keep track of throughout this book. Each time readers are introduced to a new character, there’s a bit of head-scratching to do, wondering what he or she may be up to.
This style may be disorientating for a while, but the characters’ distinct qualities make them easily likable, memorable, and relatable in no time.
As is so often the case with spy thrillers, plenty of twists happen before the final curtain. Despite having so many different threads, the plot’s separate storylines surprisingly do come together at the end, allowing for a somewhat satisfying conclusion—although it probably won’t be satisfying to someone who needs a happy ending, since the results are mixed.
In a time when so many thrillers rely on trite clichés and paper-thin characters, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” overflows with well-constructed characters and a fun, fast-paced story that keeps readers guessing what will happen next.
‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World: A Novel’
By Ace Atkins
William Morrow: Dec. 2, 2025
Hardcover, 368 pages
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