This is my first foray into McCarry's spy thrillers, and I enjoyed it more for the setting than for the character development. I'm unfamiliar with China—one of the few places about which I can say that—so the author's descriptions intrigued me. One of our children speaks Mandarin, so I've absorbed a...
"The Miernik Dossier" introduces the reader to the CIA agent, sometime poet, and polyglot Paul Christopher and the world during the middle years of the Cold War. The novel begins in Geneva, Switzerland in the late spring, where a Polish civil servant (Tadeusz Miernik) employed on contract with the W...
Why don't more people read Charles McCarry? His espionage and political fiction is among the most intelligent and best-written to be found in any genre and yet--despite the best efforts of Overlook Press which, for the last several years, has been bringing his long out of print titles back at a rat...
I couldn't decide if this was a 3 or 4 as it definitely fell somewhere between there, but I was feeling generous, so I went with a 4. First of all, I should say that the blurb for this book is very misleading. In early 18th-century America, London-born Fanny and the French soldier Philippe (ancestor...
On his experience being a deep-cover agent for the CIA: "It's one of the most boring occupations in the world, punctuated by moments of ecstasy. You sit around for days, sometimes for weeks, waiting for something you think you have made happen, to happen. And sometimes it does, and sometimes it does...
A very good espionage novel written in the early 1970's. The story is told through various agent reports, transcripts, journal entries, etc. and when I saw the structure of the book I was a bit hesitant but the plot unfolded smoothly and each character was fully realized.
I'm having a hard time rating this objectively because I have apparently become temporarily jaded about books in general. After finishing this one, I started and rejected EIGHT novels in a row!Anyway, this is a clever little labyrinthine biography of Paul Christopher. It wasn't the first Christoph...
Well, I don't normally cry at the end of spy/thriller novels, but the last line of this one got me. There are a lot of Nazi-themed novels out there, but I really liked this one because it had a lot more depth regarding familial ties and personal histories of the characters. Someone else's review he...
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