A Most Wanted Man » (Bargain)

Any spy novelist working today must contend with the legacy of John le Carré, and it's a rare author who earns comparison with the master. Le Carré's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and his trilogy starring British intelligence hero George Smiley and nemesis "Karla" are classics of Cold War literature, but the closing of that era has not left le Carré at loose ends: His later novels have departed for new milieus with no sacrifice of intrigue.

A half-starved young Russian man is smuggled into Hamburg in the dead of night with an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa.

Annabel, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, determines to save Issa from deportation, even if the price is her career—and her safety. Searching for clues to his mysterious past, she confronts the incongruous sixty-year-old scion of a failing British bank—and a triangle of impossible loves is born.

Meanwhile, scenting a sure kill in the “War on Terror,” the rival spies of three nations converge upon the innocents.

Thrilling, compassionate, peopled with characters the reader never wants to let go, A Most Wanted Man is a work of deep humanity with uncommon relevance to our times.

The Barnes & Noble Review

As the Soviet Union began to collapse and the Cold War petered out, John le Carré is said to have remarked drily that "they're breaking my rice bowl." But with A Most Wanted Man, it begins to look as if those signature Cold War novels were but appetizers to the substantial dish he has put together from the "war on terror." Thanks to that all-encompassing, massively funded construct of fear, the power and autonomy of intelligence organizations -- the "espiocracy" as le Carré so perfectly dubs it -- have surpassed anything before seen in democratic societies. That dominion has not been limited to expanded surveillance, summary imprisonment, abduction, torture, and assassination, though all that has advanced nicely. It has also shaped an intelligence lens that filters out everything but threats of one sort or another, not the least of them being threats to the exercise of a free hand. The war on terror has become a turf war in which ostensible allies coolly wrong-foot each other and, more tragically, a force field into which countless innocent people have unwittingly strayed to be casually destroyed. It is a subject for which John le Carré might have been born.