The Marionette

By Terry Fallis

Penguin Random House, October 2025/336 pages

Reviewed by Lisa Van Dusen

November 1, 2025.

Terry Fallis is nearly as well known for his own backstory as for his novels, of which The Marionette is his 10th.

Trained as a mechanical and biomedical engineer at McMaster University, Fallis put that grueling education to use fathoming the methods, processes, and functions of federal politics as a Parliament Hill aide, campaign strategist and successful PR-shop principal.

In 2005, he embarked on a mission to do for Parliament Hill what Antony Jay had done for Westminster with Yes, Minister — make it funny. At 45, Fallis started writing The Best Laid Plans, about a burnt-out political strategist whose attempt to return to normal life is derailed when he’s compelled on his way out the door to take on a kamikaze candidate in a rural Ottawa Valley riding who, of course, ends up winning.

What happened next was one of the great Cinderella stories of Canadian publishing and surely the bane of the industry’s tireless slush-pile cullers, inundated for years afterward with manuscripts from moonlighting mandarins and politicos: After several rejections, Fallis turned The Best Laid Plans into a podcast, then a self-published novel, and in 2008, it won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Then, he got a publisher (McClelland & Stewart/Douglas Gibson, now Penguin Random House).

Nine novels later, The Marionette sees the return of recurring player Angus McLintock, the accidental politician from Best Laid Plans, now Public Safety minister, but only in a supporting role. The lead is James Norval, wildly successful author of thrillers featuring Hunter Chase, “legendary, lone-wolf CIA agent who saves the world, novel after novel.”

CSIS would like Norval to travel to Mali with one of its agents so that he can infiltrate the president’s good graces and exfiltrate the Canadian hostages. The elevator pitch would be, ‘Argo meets Argylle‘.

While conducting his famously meticulous research for Hunter Chase’s next adventure, Norval lands in a prison cell in Tajikistan after wandering too close to a Russian military base. Rescued by the nearest Canadian embassy, in Kazakhstan, he is delivered to the custody of McLintock at Dushanbe International Airport and recruited for a covert mission of his own.

As it happens, 15 workers for a Canadian mining company are being detained in Mali, where a peaceful coup has just installed a new president, Adama Camara. Norval, it transpires, is Camara’s favourite writer, a fact telegraphed with the placement of the Hunter Chase novels on a bookshelf behind Camara during his inaugural news conference. CSIS would like Norval to travel to Mali with one of its agents so that he can infiltrate the president’s good graces and exfiltrate the Canadian hostages. The elevator pitch would be, “Argo meets Argylle“.

What follows is exactly what you want from a Terry Fallis novel. Fallis is known for recreating professional ecosystems from his own experience — politics, advertising, PR, engineering — as plot drivers and complication incubators.

But it’s a measure of both his facility with character and his humanism that the people he creates are such good company. At a time when clicking “play” in any streamer — especially on content involving international intrigue — comes with a silent warning that by the third episode, every character will turn out to be a malignant screwball, Fallis offers an escape to that parallel universe where most people are fundamentally decent.

Norval and his CSIS handler, Lauren Cooper — a young, Black, by-the-book operative whose personality is more deeply drawn than the service she provides as eye-roller to his cornier punchlines — are as relatable as any two characters can be who are embroiled in a perilous rescue mission in Mali.

And if covert operations happen to be the reality you’re escaping from, this one is populated mostly by well-intentioned, ethical professionals out to save democracy, not destroy it. That may seem like a fairy tale these days, but it’s a truly entertaining one.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.