THE LAST SUPPER

by Charles McCarry ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 1983

A disappointing, oddly disjointed espionage thriller from the gifted author of The Better Angels and The Secret Lovers. The novel's first third deals with Hubbard Christopher, a well-bred American poet/novelist who marries beautiful German baroness Lori in the 1920s, loses her to the Nazis in the '30s (she disappears forever), escapes to America with son Paul. . . and becomes a wartime spy, winding up as chief of US Intelligence in 1946 Berlin; working with crude yet loyal agent Barney Wolkowicz, Hubbard gets involved in a scheme to unmask Soviet double-agents--but is killed when things go awry. The focus then shifts to Hubbard's son Paul, who follows in his father's spy footsteps, joining ""the Outfit,"" with old family friend Wolkowicz (now married to beautiful German girl Ilse) as mentor. While Paul goes to 1950s Indochina, the upper-class-hating Wolkowicz exposes a Communist spy-ring in Washington--fingering, among others, ex-Outfit agent Waddy Jessup, a relative of Paul's (who did Wolkowicz a bad turn when they served together in WW II Asia). Then Paul and Wolkowicz team up in Vienna on a US/UK decoding-machine operation--but it ends miserably when the British agent is revealed as a Soviet spy who's been sleeping with Ilse. (Or was Ilse a Soviet spy to start with?) Next, in the novel's most ungainly lurch, it's suddenly 1963: Paul has resigned from the Outfit, he's on the run from Vietnamese assassins (because he claims that JFK was killed in a Vietnamese vengeance scheme!), his girlfriend Molly gets killed (despite all his efforts to protect her)--and he winds up flying into China by mistake, landing in a Chinese prison for ten years. And then, finally, it's the mid-1970s, Paul is back in post-Watergate Washington, falling in love with young ex-radical Stephanie. . . and learning at last who the real Soviet spy was all along. Admittedly, when these ultimate explanations are made, one realizes why McCarry has strung together a series of ill-developed, seemingly arbitrary episodes. But the revelations are neither surprising nor satisfying enough to justify the loose ends and ragged pacing along the way. And, with a faceless, largely passive hero in Paul, this is perhaps the least absorbing of McCarry's thrillers: solidly written, fitfully suspenseful, but seriously flawed in plot and structure.

Pub Date: May 20, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION