THE GERMAN

A German intelligence agent who suffered dire consequences when he refused to change a report at the behest of a pair of Americans vows to make them suffer even more.

Whoever told the coppers that Kurt Miller was driving around London with cocaine in his trunk knew more about his cargo than he did, presumably because he’d planted it there. Released from his 15-month sentence a few weeks early, Miller wastes no time in identifying the informant as upscale club owner Julian Roth, acting at the behest of CIA officer Carl Tanner, who’s gone independent since darkly threatening Miller over his refusal to reverse his verdict that Eightball, nee Ahmed Rashid, was blowing smoke when he claimed that the Syrian government was using chemical weapons against its own people. Tanner, along with State Department analyst Bill Carson, wanted the report altered to justify American boots on the ground. Now Tanner and Carson have thrown in their lot with former Secretary of State Lindsey Horvath, who’s running for president, just like another former secretary of state you may remember. So Miller flies to the U.S., ostensibly to seek $1 million in recompense for the job and pension his conviction cost him but really, as he gradually realizes, for something considerably more muscular and satisfying. In the manner of one of Richard Stark’s antiheroes, or Hunt’s own freelancers, he goes mano a mano with an increasingly impressive corps of antagonists, seducing some unlikely women along the way before riding off into the Hamburg sunset.

Hunt (Once Upon a Time in Camelot, 2016, etc.) supplies the perfect antidote for post-election blues: the assurance that all those endless geopolitical calculations could be settled once and for all by a spot of violent personal revenge against the bad actors.