Espionage and Horror to Go

I'm on the train, traveling to northern California. This morning, I casually glanced at my watch and was horrified to discover I had 20 minutes to shower, iron my clothes, pack, fill the hummingbird feeder and bird bath, and water houseplants before I absolutely had to leave for the train station. (I'd say the birds and plants came out better than I did.) The book I grabbed as I burned rubber out the door is Fear: A Novel of World War I (trans. from the French by Malcolm Imrie; New York Review Books, May 2014). It's based on author Gabriel Chevalier's experiences on the front lines in The Great War and was originally published in 1930. Already in my handbag were Neely Tucker's The Ways of the Dead (Viking, June 2014), featuring Washington, DC investigative reporter Sully Carter, who digs into the killing of a judge's daughter and wonders if cold-case murders are related to it; and Rachel Howzell Hall's Land of Shadows (Forge, June 2014), with hard-as-nails Los Angeles homicide detective Elouise Norton looking into the death of a Jane Doe.

If you're traveling this Fourth of July weekend, I hope your preparations are less frenzied than mine this morning. You need to get a move on if you don't yet have a book to pack.

On Monday, I told you about Terry Hayes's thriller, I Am Pilgrim, and Lenny Kleinfeld's R-rated hardboiled black comedy, Some Dead Genius. While those two books make great reading anywhere, Josh Malerman's Bird Box (Ecco/HarperCollins, May 2014), is ideally read at night under the covers with a flashlight. It's an unsettling horror thriller set in a decimated dystopian world where people barricade their houses, cover their windows with heavy blankets, and wear blindfolds when venturing outside because seeing something––nobody knows exactly what––inexplicably drives people to deadly violence against themselves and others. Needless to say, this doesn't make anyone eager to answer a knock on the front door.

When the book opens, single mother Malorie has spent the four years since the birth of her two children, Boy and Girl, training them to use their ears and to obey her without question. She decides it's time to leave their Detroit house near the river and row a boat 20 miles downstream to what might be greater safety. Of course, they must do this blindfolded. As they feel their way to the river and make their perilous journey, we intermittently learn Malorie's backstory. The incessant high tension makes the ending somewhat anticlimactic, but holy Toledo, by the time I got there, I was so wrung out, I barely cared! This book about trust and adaptability was written by the lead singer and songwriter for the rock band The High Strung. (Is this fitting or what?) I wouldn't recommend it to someone who feels let down if ultimately all questions aren't fully answered.

Last year about this time, I enjoyed a terrific spy novel, Red Sparrow (Scribner, 2013), written by ex-CIA agent Jason Matthews (see Sister Mary Murderous's review here). Now, former BBC correspondent Adam Brookes gives us the benefit of his familiarity with China in a stellar book of espionage, Night Heron (Redhook/Hachette, May 27, 2014).

After a 20-year incarceration, Li Huasheng, also known as Peanut, escapes a high-security Chinese labor camp and makes his way to Beijing. There, Li approaches freelance British journalist Philip Mangan with an offer of top-secret information and the admonishment to tell his superiors that the night heron is hunting. Mangan passes this message on to a friend in the British embassy, and it rings a bell at the UK's Secret Intelligence Service headquarters. A plot is thus set in motion to steal Chinese missile secrets. We alternate between Li, Mangan, and British operatives in China and the SIS in London, with a few stops in the United States thrown in. The atmosphere is full of foreboding. When one assesses the interests and resources of the global espionage-industrial complex, various factions in the British SIS, and Chinese state security, the odds don't look good for the inexperienced Mangan and the decades-out-of-touch Li. I was struck by the role personal motives and frailties play in state affairs and grew to care so much about Brookes's characters, I had to fight off my impulse to peek at the ending. I wasn't as successful resisting the appetite for Chinese food this book inspired. Now I must wait for Brookes's next, Midnight Blind, due out in the UK on March 12, 2015.

Have a good weekend.

Firecrackers for the Fourth of July

Do I need to remind you this Friday is the Fourth of July? Many of us Americans will be celebrating our country's birthday by hitting the road for a three-day weekend. Packing a terrific book is crucial, and do I have a few sure-fire reads for you!

Let's begin with the trip itself. We'll assume you're traveling with an adult companion. To pass the time, you could jointly tackle one of those impossible British cryptic crossword puzzles. If that attempt fizzles, and your conversation falters, fuel it with a controversy. Note I said "fuel," not "use flamethrower." Keep in mind that topics such as "your no-good cousin, the one we have to keep bailing out of jail" or "your rotten taste in men that always gets you in trouble" could ruin the trip before you reach the destination. A better choice for a delectable bone of contention is provided by Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, edited by Joe Levy and published by Wenner Books in 2005. Where would you rank albums by Elvis Presley, the Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry?

Maybe you and your travel mate would rather sing songs instead of merely talk about them (hopefully, you're belting out lyrics in your car and not on my Southwest flight to Portland, Oregon). Take along Reading Lyrics, edited by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball. It covers more than 1,000 lyrics, by more than 100 American and British song writers, from 1900 to 1975. It's a book you can use once you reach your destination, too. Hand it to your significant other while you slip into the shower. He or she can sit braced against the shower door and feed you lyrics. The two of you can warble a duet à la Natalie Cole and her father, Nat King Cole, with "Unforgettable."

Alternatively, loll in the tub with mai tais and accompany lyrics from the musical South Pacific with rhythmic splashing and drumming toes. Create some personal fireworks and then towel off to "People Will Say We're in Love" from the Broadway hit Oklahoma!. Or, commemorate American independence with a bathtub reenactment of the Boston Tea Party (Twinings English Breakfast tea would be ideal here) and a spirited rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner." (Note: This last suggestion is open to suitable modification. If you're an American in the tub with a Brit, this scenario will work well; if your tub mate is French, pay tribute to Lafayette, the aristocratic French general who fought on the Americans' side in the Revolutionary War, with beaucoup toasts of champagne. If you're sharing the tub with a fellow American of the opposite political party, display patriotism as currently practiced in the United States by trying to drown each other.)

If you're alone in the tub, there's no better place to begin Terry Hayes's I Am Pilgrim (Emily Bestler Books/Atria, May 27, 2014), which opens with a brilliant forensics expert, whom we come to know as Scott Murdoch (aka the Pilgrim), prowling around a squalid Manhattan hotel room, while an unidentifiable young woman lies in a bathtub full of acid. She appears to be the victim of a perfect, albeit gruesome, murder, but the roles she, the killer, and NYPD homicide detective Ben Bradley play in the multi-layered plot will only fully be revealed much later in this book of 600+ pages.

Meanwhile, we weave in and out of a jumble of Scott's troubled memories of people and places, piecing together his relationship with his folks, his recruitment into espionage by the Division, and his duties as a federal agent policing American spies in Europe and Asia before 9/11. Scott has barely taken early retirement when he is asked to investigate evidence of a terrorist plot found in Afghanistan. There is plenty of foreshadowing, but we readers are already following the separate story thread of a determined jihadi, codenamed "the Saracen," as he witnesses his father's beheading in Saudi Arabia, moves with his stricken mother and sisters to Bahrain, and forms the belief that the way to strike back at Saudi rulers is through their enablers in the West. It's a fascinating to and fro, watching Saracen's unfolding plot and Pilgrim's attempts to identify and stop him.

By the time we reach the ticking-clock finale, we've visited many locations, watched ingenious maneuvering and deductions, and met a host of complex characters. We may not be rooting for Saracen, but we understand him. The book could have used some trimming, and there are some exceedingly grisly scenes. But this first in an anticipated trilogy by Hayes, a movie screenwriter and producer of Payback and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, is a highly entertaining espionage thriller I was reluctant to put down.

Speaking of highly entertaining, let me tell you about Lenny Kleinfeld's wild and witty Some Dead Genius (Niaux-Noir Books, May 30, 2014), which forced me to repeatedly put the book down, squeeze my eyes shut, clamp my lips closed, and re-route laughter through my nose out of courtesy to other people on the train.

This hardboiled black comedy involves a series of artists' murders investigated by the pair of smart, but cynical Chicago cops we first met in Shooters & Chasers (see review here): Mark Bergman, a 35-year-old hunk who goes through women like a dolphin goes through waves, and John "Doonie" Dunegan, a happily married family man. In Some Dead Genius, which can be read as a standalone, they're joined by a cast of colorful characters that includes mobsters, artists, politicians, and journalists. The book is R-rated for violence, sex, and language. Its structure allows a reader to tag along with the criminals, one of whom is so racked with guilt, I had to root for him; as well as watch Doonie and Mark chase the clues (I rooted for them, too). Chicago locations are put to good use; at one point, the cops pursue the killers through the Art Institute in an extended cinematic scene that could have been choreographed by Quentin Tarantino, had he channeled the Marx Brothers.

I've been a Kleinfeld fan since the late Leighton Gage raved about him after judging books for the Best First Novel Edgar. Kleinfeld's fast-paced books are likely to appeal to fans of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, but it's difficult to convey the high energy and originality of the prose without a sample, so here you go:

Tesca [a "semi-simian" loan shark] grabbed Dale's ear and dragged the squealing art dealer past forlorn walls pimpled with empty picture hooks, up a short set of stairs to a sleeping loft. Only thing in it was an air mattress, lost inside the imprint left by a king-size bed; Dale's furniture had marched out the door months ago. Tesca kicked the air mattress out of the way as he strode to the closet, with Dale's ear and what was attached to it lurching after him.

Some Dead Genius would make a very fun vacation companion this weekend.

I'll be back on Thursday to tell you about a few more good weekend reads: Josh Malerman's Bird Box and Adam Brookes's Night Heron.

Note: I received a free advance review copy of Some Dead Genius from the author.

Book Review of Joseph Kanon's Istanbul Passage

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon

Leon Bauer is, or appears to be, just an agent for American tobacco interests in Turkey. Rejected for military service, he's spent several years in Istanbul, learning the language and customs and steeping himself in the beautiful city that sits between East and West. With his German refugee wife, Anna, he has made Istanbul his home. Even after World War II ends, he has no desire to return to the United States.

Leon's other life is on the fringes of the intelligence community. He does occasional side jobs, mostly package deliveries, for a friend at the U.S. consulate. But when he gets an assignment to pick up a human package from a fishing boat one night, the job goes very wrong. Now, Leon has left the fringes of the murky world of espionage and is left stranded in its dangerous center, not knowing whom he can trust, and improvising to complete his task on his own.

It turns out that Leon has a talent for acting as a lone agent, keeping his own counsel and observing everyone in his life to try to figure out what went wrong at the pickup, who might have been involved, and whom they might represent; all while he's working hard to try to figure out how to get Alexei, his human package, out of Turkey. Now, he looks at everyone differently. Might there be a traitor at the consulate? Is an old friend a Russian agent? What about the hostess whose parties bring together people from all countries and interests; the guy who forges documents; the police investigator; Altan, the scrupulously-polite-but-threatening commander from Turkey's secret police; and even those closest to Leon?

Leon may be new to the ruthless world of the secret agent, but he is soon drawn into its moral ambiguities and compromises; using friends, even when it places them in danger and even as he learns how unworthy Alexei is of his help.

Joseph Kanon excels at drawing a picture of the immediate postwar period. Europe's cities are in ruins, loyalties are in flux, power is shifting and nobody knows what the new world will look like. He's done it before in his novels, especially in The Alibi and The Good German, probably the novels most similar to Istanbul Passage. Though the mood may be the same, this is a different location, and one that adds a lot to the story. Istanbul has always been a divided city; East and West, Muslim, Christian, Jewish. In the 20th century no longer a world power, it sat uneasily between Germany and Russia during the war, and now it must walk a tightrope between the new powers, Russia and the United States. Istanbul is the perfect setting for this story, and Kanon brings it alive, from the street bazaars to the bathhouses, the mosques, the back streets, the cafés where people sip tea from tulip glasses, the yalis (villas) on the waterfront, and the mysteriously beautiful and dangerous Bosphorus River.

The title, Istanbul Passage, is well chosen. It can refer to Leon's passage from almost an errand boy to a rogue agent, from a black-and-white moralist to somebody who reluctantly, and to his chagrin, learns from Alexei and Altan what it takes to survive when you're on your own. Or the title may refer to Istanbul's history as a place where people are bought, sold and smuggled. Throughout the war and afterward, the city served as a passage for refugees, especially Jewish refugees, to escape to a new life. And that Jewish-refugee theme forms a part of this story as well.

This is not a shoot-'em-up, action-packed thriller, but one that puts you into its time and place, and in the mind of a man trying to figure out where his loyalties lie within it, and what choice to make when all the alternatives are bad.

Note: Istanbul Passage was published by Atria Books in May 2012. A version of this review appears on the Amazon product page, under my Amazon user name.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: Book Review of Chris Pavone's The Expats

The Expats by Chris Pavone

Many of us are familiar with the story of Pinocchio. He's a wooden puppet carved by an Italian named Geppetto and he dreams of becoming a real live boy. Unlike my sons, who don't make eye contact when they're untruthful, when Pinocchio tells a lie, his wooden nose grows longer.

A nose like Pinocchio's would have made life impossible for Katherine, the main character in Chris Pavone's The Expats, published by Crown in March 2012. She and her husband Dexter are 30-somethings who live in Washington, D.C. and have two sons, four and five years old. Dexter is a geeky freelance security consultant specializing in cybercrime. Katherine writes position papers on international trade and development for the U.S. government. Except she doesn't. Her life for 15 years has been a lie, with one particularly painful secret. Not even her husband knows the truth about her. In fact, Katherine married Dexter because he is "her antidote," an unfailingly honest man.

One day Dexter tells Katherine that a bank has offered him a security-consulting job much too lucrative to turn down. The offer is a one-year contract with the possibility of renewal. The catch? The bank is in Luxembourg and wants him now. If Dexter takes the job, Katherine will need to quit her job and the family will have only weeks in which to move. It will be difficult, but there is an upside. Katherine thinks it will be a relief to quit and spend more time with her sons. Luxembourg has a very high standard of living and finding a good school will be simple. The location will make traveling around Europe easy. And, best of all, Katherine will become, "at last, a woman who is not constantly lying to her husband about what she really does, and who she really is."

Katherine begins rebooting her identity immediately by changing her name. She's now Kate Moore. She likens being an expatriate in Luxembourg to freshman year in college, full of possibilities for reinvention and meeting new friends. She'll no longer work outside the home.

The reality of her new life is tough. It becomes a series of play dates and monotonous household chores. She feels isolated and lonely. Kate becomes acquainted with other expatriates, but one friendly American couple arouses her suspicions. They may not be who they claim. Even worse, Dexter is rarely home and when he is, he's distant and evasive about his job. She doesn't even know the name of his bank, let alone where it's located. Formerly, Kate was happy not to know everything about Dexter, because if she did, he'd want to know everything about her. Now Dexter's secretiveness confounds Kate because she knows Dexter is a good man.

Oscar Wilde said, "The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties" and Kate, troubled by her secrets, dreads the truth of this. In Luxembourg, a tax haven built on privacy, she feels surrounded by hidden agendas and deception. Kate's fellow liars may have the skills and motivation to uncover her own dishonesty. She can't stand it. Kate begins a risky investigation that exposes major crimes hidden under layer after layer of lies and double dealing.

Luxembourg

Photograph of Chris Pavone by Nina Subin

The dust jacket on The Expats says that this is Pavone's first thriller. It's hard to believe this isn't the book's first lie. Simply put, this is a dazzling debut. You'd never guess the author doesn't have many thrillers under his belt. This one delves into the personal costs of a double life and double dealings. It's a warning that nothing may be what it seems. Place it on the shelf next to books such as Manning Coles's Drink to Yesterday, John le Carré's George Smiley series and Eric Clark's Sleeping Spy.

Pavone was an expatriate in Luxembourg and this creates a wealth of interesting material for his book. The transient nature of friendships among expatriates, who arrive and later simply disappear. Their struggles to do errands or shopping that would be simple in their countries of origin. Pavone, like Kate, may have put together an Ikea dresser from 300+ pieces and felt inundated by ham sandwiches. Who knows whether his life ever contained an important deception, but the haunting nature of Kate's secrets is both plausible and touching. The endless scheming is mind-boggling.

The writing is elegant and rich in description without distracting from the plot. The plot is delicious in its unexpectedness and slow revelation of the truth. It's structured in two alternating threads. The book begins at 10:52 AM today in Paris. The time and location then shifts to two years earlier in Washington, D.C. The rest of the book weaves back and forth, not only between these two ultimately connecting threads, but within each thread as well, because Kate's thoughts shift the story among characters, time and place. It helps that the two threads are in different fonts but even so, the reader must pay close attention. At the beginning, I felt a little discombobulated by the shifts within a thread but this problem quickly passed.

Kate, whose thoughts we hear throughout the book, is an appealing protagonist. I admired her skills and determination and empathized with her mothering and relationship with Dexter ("I love him very much, even when I hate him."). Relationships between parents and children and between strangers who were, at one time, thought to be friends or possibly "friendly enemies" are well done.

I could easily read The Expats again with enjoyment. My thanks to Bonnie, one of Read Me Deadly's readers, for suggesting it.

I Spy a Sleeping Spy

Last week my good friend Sister Mary Murderous reviewed Olen Steinhauer's An American Spy. I was in the mood for espionage, but the mental picture of spies chasing through the snow in Prague or standing on a dark cold street in Helsinki made me pause and shiver. How much nicer for a spy to hibernate during the winter and to awaken in the spring when it is warmer.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Hibernation may be pleasant for the spy, but it presents the spy's master with obvious potential problems. The goal is for the spy to be comfortable sleeping in enemy territory while disarming the enemy's suspicions, yet the spy shouldn't be so comfortable s/he will refuse to be awakened. The spymaster in Donald E. Westlake's Money for Nothing gets around this problem in an ingenious way. His sleeping spy doesn't realize he's been asleep, or even a spy, until he's told to wake up.

Here's how it happens. Josh Redmont receives a mysterious check for $1,000 from United States Agent. Redmont is a fairly honest guy. He tries to trace the check but he doesn't get anywhere and he could use the money. Whoever United States Agent is, the check is good so Redmont cashes it––then the one he gets the next month, and the next month after that. The checks keep coming for seven years and Redmont keeps cashing them.

Then one day, a stranger introduces himself as United States Agent and tells Redmont that he's active. The threatened safety of Redmont's wife and child will insure Redmont's cooperation in an assassination scheme that is somewhere between a Westlake comic caper and a hard-boiled Westlake-writing-as-Richard-Stark plot. The book's indeterminate nature keeps it from being top-of-the-line Westlake, but it's still an entertaining book about a man who unexpectedly proves to be a more enterprising agent than his spymaster dreamed possible.

Eric Clark's The Sleeper is more serious, ironic and suspenseful than Westlake's book. It invites discussion about gray areas of morality. Clark's protagonist is James Fenn, a young British journalist who is a communist sympathizer like his father. Fenn thinks he knows what he's letting himself in for when he walks out of Hungary in 1956 with a rescued baby strapped to his chest. The escape from Hungary is planned because Fenn is to be Russia's sleeping spy in England. The baby is a "welcome bonus" who is adopted by Joseph Banks, a very rich English academic, and his Hungarian-born wife.

It's now more than 20 years later, in the 1980s. Fenn no longer works on Fleet Street. He, his wife and two young daughters have moved to Malta, where they live simply but happily. Fenn isn't much of a Marxist anymore.

Richard Stanley Godwin, former Defence Minister, has just been elected British prime minister. In West Germany, the CIA has been questioning Vitali Suslov, but the Americans can't decide whether he's a genuine defector or a KGB plant. Based on what Suslov says, someone in England has passed secret information to the Russians. The CIA suspects Godwin's good friend and adviser, Sir Joseph Banks.

The CIA insists that the British investigate Banks, but there's a big problem. Several years earlier, British Intelligence tried to investigate Banks and when Defence Minister Godwin got wind of it, he was outraged and put a stop to it. Now, the investigation will have to be done without Prime Minister Godwin's knowledge. An elaborate plan is devised that involves Fenn, the journalist with a special connection to Banks through Banks's adopted daughter. The British know Fenn is a never-awakened Soviet spy, so a British agent named Mallahide will pretend to be the Russian spymaster who tells Fenn it is time to wake up.

The ensuing scheme involving the manipulation of Fenn and the targeting of Banks is more complex than it needs to be. This makes it less believable, but its complexity makes it noteworthy and worthy of Machiavelli. As the screw comes down hard, the plot twists and turns and the tension mounts to the almost unbearable point. Mallahide pops more and more aspirin and Fenn sleeps less and less until the book's conclusion, when the reader can finally put the book down and sleep.

That is, unless the reader needs another book with a sleeping spy, such as the following: William Safire's Sleeper Spy features a Russian spy who has earned a fortune in the U.S. through his investment of Russian money. The Russians have forgotten exactly who he is, but they––and the Americans––want to hunt him down. There is a race to identify an Oxford-educated IRA sleeper agent in former Director General of MI5 Stella Rimington's thriller, Secret Asset. Michael Gilbert's Into Battle is set on the eve of World War I, while Daniel Silva's The Unlikely Spy is set in World War II. In Manning Coles' second Tommy Hambledon book, A Toast to Tomorrow, a man with amnesia is released from the hospital and becomes an important person in the Nazi party before he remembers that he's a British spy. Now that's what I call hibernation!

Book Review of Olen Steinhauer's An American Spy

An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer

The Cold War era was the heyday of the spy novel. The bad guys were Soviets or East Germans, and the action involved gray men in gray cities behind the Iron Curtain. When the Cold War ended, some thought that would mean the demise of the spy novel, but they were wrong. There will always be the "other," an enemy to hate and fear. Today, we have terrorists of various stripes, of course, but we also have a new bogeyman in town, and he's Chinese. As well as a change in adversary, modern spy fiction reflects other global developments. The conspiracies these days are worldwide, with each side forming shifting alliances with armies, terrorists, self-styled freedom fighters and tribes from every hotspot on the globe. Spies jet from New York to London to Geneva to Hong Kong and dozens of other locales, using all the latest technologies to try to outmaneuver each other.

An American Spy is as cynical as any Cold War novel, and at least as full of double- and triple-crosses. Milo Weaver, a former "Tourist" with the CIA, is recovering from a gunshot wound to the gut and the obliteration of his department, both orchestrated by Xin Zhu, an operative with China's security service. Milo wants nothing more than to make his exit from the spy business permanent, to join the civilian life and to be a regular husband to his wife, Tina, and father to his stepdaughter, Stephanie. But Alan Drummond, Milo's old boss, is determined to exact revenge on Xin Zhu, and he drags Milo into his scheme.

At the same time, Xin Zhu is threatened by more than Alan's scheme, as he finds himself––and, possibly, his beloved wife––the target of another plot by hidden enemies within his own security service. Milo will find himself and his family caught in the middle when Alan's scheme and the Chinese plot come together.

Here's where you notice a more subtle difference between Cold War spy fiction and Olen Steinhauer's Milo Weaver series. In the former, the operatives are usually lone wolves, with their personal relationships tending to be fleeting or emotionally barren. In An American Spy, family relationships are preeminent, not just to Milo, but to Alan, to Xin Zhu and to several secondary characters. The need to protect the family or to avenge harm done to family members forms the motive for much of the plot. It adds a different dimension to the spy story.

This is the third volume in the Milo Weaver series, following The Tourist and The Nearest Exit.  While this book can be read as a standalone, I don't recommend it. Almost 100 pages of the book go by before Milo Weaver even appears on the scene, and if you don't already know who Xin Zhu, Erika Schwartz and Letitia Jones are, you could be excused for wondering what they have to do with Milo and why the book seems to be about them. And even when Milo does make his appearance, he may seem to be largely passive––not surprising, considering he is a reluctant player in the game.

The plot is slow to draw the reader into its web, the pace quickening only in the last quarter of the book. This may not be satisfying to a reader who is unfamiliar with the prior books in the series or to one who is more thriller-oriented. This is a spy story, not a thriller. It's about the machinations of the characters; figuring out their hidden meanings and motivations and how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. And, most of all, it's about a couple of enemies, Milo Weaver and Xin Zhu, who have an unspoken understanding of each other, and a sad and hard-earned knowledge of the price their professions exact on them and their families. This is a rewarding read for someone who has an interest in that more personal kind of spy story and the patience to follow an intricate and deliberately-paced plot.

Before Olen Steinhauer wrote the Milo Weaver books, he wrote a terrific espionage series about a fictional Communist country at the end of the Cold War era. In addition to the Milo Weaver books, I highly recommend that series. Here are the books in that series, in publication-date order: The Bridge of Sighs, The Confession, 36 Yalta Boulevard, Liberation Movements and Victory Square.

Note: I received a free review copy of An American Spy, and a version of this review appears on the Amazon product page under my Amazon username.