The Sunday Spy »

It is an unlikely combination of disasters that persuades Alan Trosper, the reluctant hero of William Hood's earlier novels Spy Wednesday and Cry Spy, to take up once again the tools of his craft: A State Department secretary, compromised by pornographic Russian surveillance photographs, is killed in a bizarre Central Park hit; and a former Moscow Center agent, now freelancing for himself, offers to sell evidence of the activities of a highly placed spy. The agent's letter also provides a clue that the security of the Firm itself may have been breached, and three of Trosper's former colleagues have come under suspicion. This compelling and utterly convincing story presents a new twist on the familiar theme of spy and counter-spy, for in place of the monolith of the Soviet Empire, Trosper now confronts an intelligence world fragmented beyond recognition, where agents scramble to attach themselves to new masters, where old allegiances cannot be trusted.

Publishers Weekly

It doesn't take much-a discussion of the pros and cons of microdots here, a chat about the politics of espionage there-for readers to sense the absolute authority Hood (Cry Spy, 1989) brings to his third espionage thriller. And no wonder: for some of his 30 years with U.S. spy outfits, Hood was executive officer of the CIA's counterintelligence division. Now the Cold War is over, and Hood's returning hero, Alan Trosper, though no longer with the Company, is persuaded to act as the contact for a potential Russian defector, Sinon, and to verify his information-which promises to include the unveiling of a Russian mole. Trosper's investigation has him confronting the compromised officials whom Sinon has fingered and, in an effort to reel in the defector, journeying to Prague, where he runs up against an unpredictable chief inspector. While the questions the plot poses are worthy, and the atmospherics dead-on, the novel's structure tends to obscure them, by focusing on Trosper's various searches. What results is a spy yarn with plenty of thoughts, but not nearly enough thrills. (May)