Second Sight (Paul Christopher Series #5) » (Bargain)

Charles McCarry is the author, most recently, of the acclaimed thriller Christopher's Ghosts. He is the author of nine other critically acclaimed novels, including The Miernik Dossier, The Secret Lovers, and The Better Angels. During the Cold War, he was an intelligence officer operating under deep cover in Europe, Africa, and Asia. He lives in Massachusetts and Florida.

"As much a part of our national literature as the works of Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, and Ernest Hemingway."-Otto Penzler, The New York Sun, May 17, 2006

Since his reemergence with the publication of Old Boys, Charles McCarry has been heralded as one of the select few novelists of espionage who manage to break out of his genre to shine as a brilliant and unique novelist. Second Sight is seventh in the series that follows the legendary spy Paul Christopher-a man ensnared by a line of work that never failed to exert its insidious influence outside professional boundaries.

Now retired and living the quiet life as a loving husband in Washington, D.C., Christopher has survived battlefields of World War II, undercover Cold War killing grounds, and imprisonment in China. But now, throughout the Arab world, U.S. agents are being kidnapped and brain-drained by an unidentified enemy armed with a diabolical new drug. Christopher's old friend and superior in "the Outfit" calls with a command he feels he must obey. But what begins for Christopher as a global manhunt swiftly turns into something far closer to home. For the key to the danger he must defuse is a secret buried deep in his own perilous past.

Publishers Weekly

The author calls this the last chapter in the Paul Christopher saga that has occupied him on and off since The Miernik Dossier (1973). Christopher has remained a somewhat shadowy figure, though there is no denying McCarry's remarkable narrative gifts, his imaginative use of little-known information and his insider's knowledge of the CIA. All have been put to better use in previous Chrstopher books than here, however. Second Sight is, to put it mildly, overstuffed, with a narrative that goes all the way back to biblical times and embraces pre-WW II Germany as well as the present. It's a complex tale involving Christopher, his heroic German mother, his daughter who was brought up among a lost Israeli tribe in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, an exotic psychic, an elaborate plot to destabilize the Outfit (read: CIA) and kill Jews, and the current and former Outfit directors. At times McCarry's political views blur his usual sharpness, as in a ludicrous portrait of a highly successful, leftist TV guru; at others, the arcane knowledge he usually interweaves so skillfully seems wilfully dragged in. It's a tribute of sorts that he makes such a high-flown saga readable at all, but his inability to create human characters rather than symbols and his fatal lack of le Carre's wit and sophistication in dealing with often similar material make this an ambitious, if intermittently entertaining failure. 35,000 first printing; author tour. (July)