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Summary
Summary
In Olen Steinhauer's bestseller The Tourist , reluctant CIA agent Milo Weaver uncovered a conspiracy linking the Chinese government to the highest reaches of the American intelligence community, including his own Department of Tourism---the most clandestine department in the Company. The shocking blowback arrived in the Hammett Award--winning The Nearest Exit when the Department of Tourism was almost completely wiped out as the result of an even more insidious plot.
Following on the heels of these two spectacular novels comes An American Spy , Olen Steinhauer's most stunning thriller yet. With only a handful of "tourists"--CIA-trained assassins--left, Weaver would like to move on and use this as an opportunity to regain a normal life, a life focused on his family. His former boss in the CIA, Alan Drummond, can't let it go. When Alan uses one of Milo's compromised aliases to travel to London and then disappears, calling all kinds of attention to his actions, Milo can't help but go in search of him.
Worse still, it's beginning to look as if Tourism's enemies are gearing up for a final, fatal blow.
With An American Spy , Olen Steinhauer, by far the best espionage writer in a generation, delivers a searing international thriller that will settle once and for all who is pulling the strings and who is being played.
An American Spy is one of The New York Times Notable Books of 2012.
Author Notes
Olen Steinhauer was born in Baltimore, Maryland on June 21, 1970. He received an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College in Boston. After college, he spent a year in Romania on a Fulbright Grant. This experience helped provide the inspiration for his first five books. His works include The Bridge of Sighs, The Cairo Affair, All the Old Knives, and the Milo Weaver Series. In 2010, he received the Hammett Prize for best literary crime novel for The Nearest Exit.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in 2008, bestseller Steinhauer's excellent if initially convoluted third thriller featuring Milo Weaver (after 2010's The Nearest Exit) finds Weaver no longer a member of the CIA's deeply clandestine Department of Tourism, which was shut down after Chinese spy Xin Zhu, motivated more by personal vengeance than allegiance to his government, orchestrated the assassination of 33 of its agents one by one around the world. When Alan Drummond, Weaver's boss at the now defunct department, disappears from his London hotel, Weaver gets on his trail-a matter that becomes much more urgent after Drummond's wife and daughter are kidnapped. Steinhauer is particularly good at articulating contemporary spy craft-the mechanics of surveillance and intelligence in the digital age and the depth of paranoia endemic to the trade. In addition, his ability to create characters with genuine emotions and conflicts, coupled with an insightful and often poetic writing style, set him apart in the world of espionage fiction. 125,000 first printing. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, the Gernert Company. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In Steinhauer's superb spy novel, Milo Weaver (The Nearest Exit, 2010, etc.), in from the cold, wants to stay that way, but no one will let him. Some say he was born to be a spy. Others don't say anything at all about him, because the fact is Milo Weaver--maximally understated, eminently ignorable--is cellophane. Those who know spy-craft best see virtue in this of course, and he's recruited for the Tourists, an elite, extremely secret branch of the CIA. In time, Milo becomes remarkable, a great American spy. And then the unthinkable happens. Before one can say clandestine, the Tourists are converted to history--33 of them, virtually the entire department, wiped out at the command of the wicked and wily Xin Zhu, a spymaster highly placed in the Guoanbu, the intelligence arm of the People's Republic of China. Milo survives, but is suddenly jobless. In from the cold by accident as it were, he finds himself basking in familial warmth: beautiful, loving wife, adorable six year old daughter. As seldom before, in a way he never expected to be, Milo's content. Not so for Alan Drummond, his boss. Rabid for vengeance, Drummond wants the aid and all-out support of his ace agent and will do anything to get it. As it happens, Xin Zhu is also interested in the talented Mr. Weaver and will do anything to turn him. And so begins a geopolitical game of chess--with Milo a pawn, destined, soon, to be half-forgotten--between a pair of opponents consumed by mutual detestation. But in chess, as in life, if certain pawns are half-forgotten they can become powerful enough to change the game. Thickets of tricky conspiracies, swamps full of secret agendas: Reader, you're in le Carr-land, guided there unerringly by one of the best of the newer crop.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* When we last saw Milo Weaver, the spy had been shot on the steps of his Brooklyn brownstone (The Nearest Exit, 2010). This book begins with Chinese spymaster Xin Zhu, the man who crippled the CIA's Department of Tourism and engineered Weaver's shooting. But Zhu's coups haven't earned him accolades, and he's fighting a power struggle in the Guoanbu. Weaver is alive, and his former boss, Alan Drummond, wants his help taking revenge on Zhu. Weaver says no. Drummond's plan is foolhardy his agents are dead and his department no longer exists and Weaver no longer wants to be part of the machine that destroys people. When Drummond proceeds without him, however, Weaver finds he is already involved. The best spy novelists have long shaded their stories with the gray of moral ambiguity, and Steinhauer works in that tradition while deconstructing James Bond even further. Political considerations play almost no role in this dizzying, dazzling array of hidden agendas and confused allegiances; all motivations are personal, and the ultimate goal is survival. Weaver may be haunted by the human cost of the machine, but he doesn't know how to turn it off, either. Another must-read from the best novelist working in the tradition of John le Carre.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
COMRADE Col. Xin Zhu, obese spy and head of the Expedition Agency within the Sixth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security, suspects there is a C.I.A. mole burrowing into China's secrets. But he is under threat from Wu Liang and his ally, Yang Qing-Nian, of the Supervision and Liaison Committee, an offshoot of the Central Committee's Political and Legislative Affairs Committee. Zhu believes Zhang Guo of the Supreme People's Procuratorate is on his side, probably, but he is less sure of the veteran schemer Comrade Lt. Gen. Sun Bingjun. If this plethora of Chinese names and Chinese bureaucracies is a little daunting, that's exactly the intention of Olen Steinhauer, a spy novelist who refuses to make it easy for his readers, but rewards them richly in the end. Not for Steinhauer the simple, linear march of the traditional thriller. Rather, he drops the reader (and his characters) into situations of the most mind-bending complexity and forces them to work things out for themselves. Not since John le Carré has a writer so vividly evoked the multilayered, multifaceted, deeply paranoid world of espionage, in which identities and allegiances are malleable and ever shifting, the mirrors of loyalty and betrayal reflecting one another to infinity. In this intensely clever, sometimes baffling book, it's never quite clear who is manipulating whom, and which side is up. In his earlier novels "The Tourist" and "The Nearest Exit," Steinhauer introduced the Department of Tourism, a small, highly trained, perfectly ruthless blackops cell within the C.I.A. responsible for doing the agency's dirtiest work. At the start of "An American Spy," Xin Zhu has sent the Tourists packing by luring some 33 of them to their deaths in a coordinated global hit. Out for revenge, the former head of the department, Alan Drummond, is determined to recruit Milo Weaver, one of the few surviving Tourists and the dour, damaged hero of Steinhauer's two previous books. But Weaver is trying to give it all up - the drink, the cigarettes, the spying, the lying - to spend time with an adored daughter (who is not biologically his), restore a marriage (undermined by deceit) and recover from the latest attempt to kill him (a bullet wound that has required the removal of part of his intestines). When Drummond disappears and then Milo's family also vanishes, he is tricked back into the game, to his own annoyance. "You forgot that no one is above deception," he admonishes himself. "You became as naïve as all the other civilians." Behind the distortions lie multiple selfdeceptions, the personal evasions that muddy every action. Even the most powerful are fallible. Zhu believes his annihilation of the Department of Tourism is righteous vengeance for the death of his only son, preferring not to face the guilty truth that his young new wife, feeding him dumplings in their apartment high above Beijing, was formerly his daughter-in-law. Weaver can beat a man to pulp in an airport washroom as effectively as the next spy, but he's no James Bond: he forgets to put salt in his cooking; he glumly chews nicotine gum; he has nightmares in which he fails to protect his daughter from a gang of thugs. The fat Chinese spy is playing Weaver, and being played himself, because the spies are themselves pawns of the spymasters in Washington and Beijing. "It's extremely messy," Zhu says, with understatement. Steinhauer is more interested in twists of plot than turns of phrase, but the very bluntness of his novel's writing adds to its impact. His women have less psychological depth: the wives of Drummond and Weaver are all but indistinguishable. A surviving Tourist operative named Leticia Jones is just a sexy killer of the old school. But where Steinhauer's fiction succeeds masterfully is in the portrayal of one reality from different, deceptive angles, transferring his characters' indecision and uncertainty to the page. The plot repeatedly shunts back and forth in chronology and perspective. Everyone lies, for different reasons. The picture is always opaque. Real espionage is actually like this. Winston Churchill, a keen aficionado of wartime deception, described the spying game as "tangle within tangle, plot and counterplot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party . . . interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true." Spying is itself a form of fiction, the creating of invented worlds, which perhaps explains why so many of the best spy novelists were once in the intelligence business: W. Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and le Carré himself. I don't know if Steinhauer was ever a spy - he writes with the sort of detailed relish that suggests personal experience - but he certainly has the right name for it. Gustav Steinhauer was Kaiser Wilhelm's spy chief during World War I. He established an elaborate German espionage network in Britain and even toured the country, in disguise, the month before war broke out. For reasons that have never been fully explained, the British security service, M.I.5, knew where he was, but didn't arrest him. He may have been a double agent. Perhaps Olen Steinhauer is related to Gustav Steinhauer. Someone should ask him. But I doubt you'd get a straight answer. Ben Macintyre's latest book, "Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies," will be published in July.
Library Journal Review
When a brutal Chinese spymaster "de-activates" 33 agents in the CIA's Tourism black-ops unit, survivors Alan Drummond and his sidekick, Milo Weaver, are left jobless. The men seem to be working at cross-purposes as they separately battle to overcome fierce strikes against them. This time, Xin Zhu threatens their wives and offspring, and no obvious ally is a safe bet. Set in pre-Olympics 2008, this suspense-laden novel weaves Chinese extremists, love stories, and UN spies into a high-pressure cyclone of mayhem and betrayal for Milo and those he cares about. VERDICT This follow-up to The Tourist and The Nearest Exit proves the adage that good things come in threes. With Milo Weaver as the conscience-worn hero, Steinhauer does for Chinese-Western intrigue what John le Carre did for the Cold War era of international espionage. A mesmerizing series for dedicated readers of spy fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 9/23/11.]-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.