A Cold War yarn befitting the world of le Carré.
Harkaway, who’s John le Carré’s son, slips this spy tale into the 10-year gap between The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).
In London in the early spring of 1963, a Hungarian assassin named Miki Bortnik shows up at a literary agent’s office to kill a man named Laszlo Bánáti, on instructions from the Thirteenth Directorate (think KGB). But the repentant killer confesses to Bánáti’s assistant, Susanna Gero, that God has told him not to do it. In any case, Bánáti has disappeared. Susanna tells MI6, who naturally wants to know what the Soviets are up to. Meanwhile, George Smiley has retired from the Circus (MI6) and is spending his time with his wife, Ann. “There was a rumour—unconfirmed and a little scandalous—that George Smiley might almost be happy.” Control (the head of British Intelligence) orders that Smiley be persuaded to deal with the case. Although it would be a temporary assignment, Smiley at first demurs, saying, “Let the old dog sit by the cooker.” But he ultimately agrees, much to Ann’s quiet exasperation. She knows he loves her, but the Circus is his “grey mistress.” Bánáti is discovered to be a Soviet agent known as Róka, and now he’s on the run. Smiley’s nemesis is the unseen Soviet Intelligence officer known as Karla, a dark presence in three previous le Carré novels. The best intelligence work is slow, and “spying is waiting.” The novel proceeds at a pace to match as it immerses the reader in a world of dread and drear, “shadows and sorrows.”
A Cold War yarn befitting the world of le Carré.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780593833490
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Fun for fans of fictional mayhem.
Revenge is the order of the day in this action-packed Gray Man thriller.
That freelance assassin Court Gentry has enemies shocks no one. Code-named Violator in his CIA days, he has since become the Gray Man, so elusive that some think him a myth. He’s not complicated: “If I’ve got pants on, I’ve got a gun on,” he describes himself succinctly. In this episode, everybody wants something. James Westwood wants to be senator and eventually president, and isn’t above committing treason to get there. Two fearsome killers, each with his own agenda, want Gentry dead. Gentry himself wants to get to Russia for contract work, but first he must get out of Bulgaria, where he kills Northern Irish criminal Charlie Coyle in a gunfight. Hyperline Level IIIA body armor saves Gentry’s life in that encounter, but now he must face Charlie’s dad, Campbell Coyle, whose “one singular objective in life” is to come to America and cut a bloody swath to exact deadly revenge on “the man who had murdered his son.” The elder Coyle is a “bad man with a dark history, and he came from a long line of men with dark histories.” Yet he understands how much he and the Gray Man have in common, that they are both “God’s living proof” that humans have not progressed in 800 years. There’s also Lancer, a dangerous former Navy SEAL turned assassin who says that “Court Gentry is the man who put me in prison in Cuba, and he’s gonna pay.” Meanwhile, series regular Zack Hightower spies on his biological daughter. He means no harm but simply wants to know that she’s well, but what follows is one damn thing after another. At first it looks like a separate plot line, but everything comes back to the Gray Man. The story is nearly 500 pages of gunfire, explosions, a spring-loaded wrist stiletto, treason, vengeance, blood, bodies, and a teenage girl who loves her adoptive father and doesn’t know bio dad even exists.
Fun for fans of fictional mayhem.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593954812
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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