Our Kind of Traitor »

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.

The unrivaled master of spy fiction returns with a taut and suspenseful of dirty money and dirtier politics.

For nearly half a century, John le Carré's limitless imagination has enthralled millions of readers and moviegoers around the globe. From the cold war to the bitter fruits of colonialism to unrest in the Middle East, he has reinvented the spy novel again and again. Now, le Carré makes his Viking debut with a stunning tour-de-force that only a craftsman of his caliber could pen. As menacing and flawlessly paced as The Little Drummer Girl and as morally complex as The Constant Gardener, Our Kind of Traitor is signature le Carré.

. Perry and Gail are idealistic and very much in love when they splurge on a tennis vacation at a posh beach resort in Antigua. But the charm begins to pall when a big-time Russian money launderer enlists their help to defect. In exchange for amnesty, Dima is ready to rat out his vory (Russian criminal brotherhood) compatriots and expose corruption throughout the so-called legitimate financial and political worlds. Soon, the guileless couple find themselves pawns in a deadly endgame whose outcome will be determined by the victor of the British Secret Service's ruthless internecine battles.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Like his beloved touchstone Joseph Conrad, le Carré tells his story here through nested narrative filters. Roughly the first third of the book recounts how a lapsed academic like Perry came to be brokering the defection of a billionaire Russian money launderer named Dima to Great Britain. At first we find them in Antigua, as a friendly tennis match with the comically boorish Russian evolves into the makings of an international incident. Gradually we learn that we're getting the story secondhand, recapped alternately by Perry and his plucky girlfriend, Gail, to their MI5 debriefers. At first this is complicated verging on baroque, but le Carré has the nuances of their interrogators' separate voices down perfectly, and it's all tidy enough in retrospect.