The Tourist, by Olen Steinhauer

This, to my mind, is one of the best spy novels I have ever read – it compares well with the best books by excellent writers like John Le Carré, Alan Furst, Graham Greene and Daniel Silva. The key character in the book is a gentleman known and feared under several names, but mostly known in the book as Milo Weaver. He works for a branch of the CIA which organizes “tourism”, located in New York rather than Langley, Virginia. It’s not entirely clear what this outfit does, but clearly it is the base and command center for a large number of “tourists” that operate all over the world, and which seemingly have very wide job descriptions and exceptionally wide powers. The tourists travel the world combating global organized crime, terrorists and other miscellaneous enemies of the United States.

The action in The Tourist takes place in three separate time periods – the first in 2001 and the second and third in 2007. When we first meet Weaver in September 2001 he is a worn out man, almost destroyed by the demands of his job as a “tourist”, and using amphetamine to stay awake and alert. His boss, Tom Grainger, is a spy-master seemingly with a good eye for the big picture but also very demanding and controlling. Weaver is hunting an assassin nick-named The Tiger. The hunt, as the work as a tourist itself, is a difficult one. Weaver states that “the truth was that intelligence work seldom, if ever, ran in straight lines. Facts accumulated, many of them useless, some connecting and then disconnecting.”

The narrative of the book is wonderful, and larded with lies of omission, conspiracies, myopic rationality and manipulation. The overall story emerges gradually, as it has to be detected, on the principles that “it’s a known fact that no decent intelligence operative believes anything he’s told,” that nothing necessarily is what it seems to be and that nobody can be trusted. The plot is rich, intelligent and facts soft and subject to multiple interpretations, and one of the compelling qualities of Steinhauer’s writing is that the action and plot are just as dizzying to the reader as they are for Milo Weaver.

When Milo finally seemingly finds the elusive Tiger, and hopes to bring his long chase to its conclusion, it turns out he has been manipulated, and that rather than finishing a long chase the capture is the beginning of a much more terrifying and threatening nightmare for Milo Weaver. The Tiger gives him information that forces him to reinterpret his own activities as well as that of the Tourism Department and to question the action of his boss. As events unfold, Weaver finds himself a fugitive, a dear friend dead, his boss killed and dirty secrets from his past that he thought had been buried forever resurfacing.

The Tourist is a wonderful, suspenseful and very, very entertaining spy thriller which I do not hesitate to strongly recommend. It has received rave reviews from all over the world, is an international bestseller, has been of the New York Times bestseller list, and will be filmed by Warner Brothers with George Clooney in one of the main roles. And all of it is well deserved. If you like thrillers, you really will not want to let this one pass you by!

Links to books by Olen Steinhauer at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Tagged as: book review, NYT bestseller, Olen Steinhauer, spy thriller