If for some odd reason you are reading this blog and have not yet read Olen Steinhauer’s The Tourist please rectify that ASAP.
This may seem a tad pushy but, trust me, I am doing you a favor.
The paperback is out today (and you can buy an ebook as well) so you really have no excuse at this point.
As I said in my review:
What makes Steinhauer different from so many writers of international thrillers is his ability to write a suspenseful espionage plot and yet still have elements of the more literary aspect of novels. The writing is tight and even graceful at times. The characters are not cardboard cutouts and Steinhauer delves into their psychological make up and personality for more than just plot plausibility.
And Olen has provided some hand picked music to go with the release. So head over there and get your The Tourist iMix
So stop by your local bookstore or click on the link above and read The Tourist so you are ready when The Nearest Exit comes out in May.
Booklist review of The Nearest Exit below.
Since the events of The Tourist (2009), Milo Weaver has served time in prison, worked in administration, and tried to reconnect with his wife and daughter. But talk therapy is hard when you’re trained to keep secrets. When asked to return to the field, he agrees, although, because of his disgust with the Department of Tourism (a black-ops branch of the CIA), he plans to feed information to his father, Yevgeny Primakov, the “secret ear” of the UN. But his handlers don’t trust him, either, giving him a series of vetting assignments that culminates in an impossible loyalty test: the abduction and murder of a 15-year-old girl. Ironically, Weaver is then tasked with finding a security breach that threatens the very existence of Tourism—and the lives of the Tourists. Seeing his own brutal compatriots as humans, he does his best to save the thing he despises, a conundrum that pretty much sums up the shades of gray that paint this modern-day espionage masterpiece. The Tourist was impressive, proving that Steinhauer had the ability to leap from the historical setting of his excellent Eastern European quintet to a vividly imagined contemporary landscape. But this is even better, a dazzling, dizzyingly complex world of clandestine warfare that is complicated further by the affairs of the heart. Steinhauer never forgets the human lives at stake, and that, perhaps, is the now-older Weaver’s flaw: he is too human, too attached, to be the perfect spy. His failure to save the girl he was told to kill threads the whole book like barbed wire. –Keir Graff
