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Book Reviewed by:Milo Weaver used to be a “tourist” for the CIA—an undercover agent with no home, no identity. But when the arrest of an assassin exposes new layers of intrigue in his old cases, he has no choice but to go back undercover and find out who’s holding the strings once and for all.
Milo Weaver used to be a “tourist” for the CIA—an undercover agent with no home, no identity—but he’s since retired from the field to become a middle-level manager at the CIA’s New York headquarters. He’s acquired a wife, a daughter, and a brownstone in Brooklyn, and he’s tried to leave his old life of secrets and lies behind. However, when the arrest of a long-sought-after assassin sets off an investigation into one of Milo’s oldest colleagues and exposes new layers of intrigue in his old cases, he has no choice but to go back undercover and find out who’s holding the strings once and for all.
In The Tourist, Olen Steinhauer---twice nominated for an Edgar Award---tackles an intricate story of betrayal and manipulation, loyalty and risk in an utterly compelling novel that is both thoroughly modern and yet also reminiscent of the espionage genre’s luminaries: Len Deighton, Graham Greene, and John LeCarré.
The Tourist is fast, slick, and gratifying... Though violations of rudimentary spycraft will drive some readers crazy, sometimes a story is so good at granting you an alternative look at your own world that you tug and pull to make it fit just right...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Amy Reading).
Representing the Clandestine
If Tourism, Olen Steinhauer's invented black-ops division within the CIA, were
real, what would its insignia look like? Trevor Paglen has documented seventy-five
shoulder patches designed for United States covert agencies in his book, I
Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me. (The title
is a translation from Latin of the patch for the Navy Air Test and Evaluation
Squadron 4, at Point Mugu in California).
He submitted hundreds of Freedom of
Information requests for the images, then decoded their heraldry and iconography
by interviewing military men and women. If, for instance, you see a patch with
five stars on top and one star on the bottom, you know it has ...
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