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Book Summary InformationAuthor: Olen Steinhauer Edition: Hardcover Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2009-03-03 ISBN: 0312369727 Number of pages: 416 Publisher: Minotaur Books
Book Reviews of The TouristBook Review: There are tourists, and then there are Tourists... Summary: 5 Stars
This is, quite simply, the best spy novel I can remember reading in what must be many decades. Daniel Silva, in comparison, is writing books for middle school kids, and even Alan Furst pales slightly in comparison.
This impeccably structured novel revolves around Milo Weaver and his battles for identity and meaning within the world of "Tourism". Forget digital cameras and souvenirs, however; Weaver and his colleagues travel the world on behalf of a clandestine US intelligence agency, combatting global organized crime, terrorists and other miscellaneous enemies of the United States. We first meet Weaver as a burned out shell of a man, whose soul is being destroyed by what the job demands of him. Its early pages dart back and forth across a six-year-timespan, introducing us to key characters in the drama to follow, from fellow Tourists to his boss Tom Grainger, from the woman he loves and marries to the woman whose investigation into the death of a hired killer Weaver has been hunting, nicknamed the Tiger, threatens to derail his fragile happiness.
Each of those characters is carefully drawn and feels as vivid and 'real' as does Milo himself in his struggle to extricate himself from a trap to implicate him in murder and treason. Who orchestrates that conspiracy, for what reason and how it is resolved is at the heart of the plot. Steinhauer never strikes a false note in his writing or cuts corners in the intricate plot. Early on, as Milo muses about his profession, "the truth was that intelligence work seldom, if ever, ran in straight lines. Facts accumulated, many of them useless, some connecting and then disconnecting." Steinhauer, however, keeps each fact relevant, and carefully scatters clues to the novel's denouement along the path that the reader will follow. Never, however, does the outcome feel inevitable or predictable; nor are the clues so opaque that the reader feels frustrated or irritated.
"Tourism is all about storytelling. After a while you collect too many layers. It's hard to discern story from truth." In Steinhauer's capable hands, his story becomes the truth, to such an extent that when I finally put the book down with a sigh of regret, I almost headed off to Avenue of the Americas in search of Weaver's (fictional) Tourism Department headquarters. And I did download a bunch of 1960s and 1970s chanson of the kind that Weaver listens to obsessively to connect himself to the world of love and family even as he must wage a solitary battle in a much darker universe.
If Amazon allowed us to rate this six stars, I'd award them all to this book. Strongly recommended for anyone who enjoys a novel revolving around puzzles and intrigue, but especially for any fans of spy or suspense novels. A noirish tone complements the novel's plot beautifully. The only folks who won't enjoy this are those with a taste for black and white: heroes vs villains, and nary a trace of nuance. This is a book whose author navigates so deftly between those lines that we realize that while Milo may be a hero to us, we also accept sadly that his wife, Tina, is right to see him as a kind of villain.
A tour de force.
Summary of The TouristMilo 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.
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