In Olen Steinhauer’s bestseller The Tourist, reluctant CIA agent Milo Weaver uncovered a conspiracy linking the Chinese government to the highest reaches of the American intelligence community, including his own Department of Tourism—the most clandestine department in the Company. The shocking blowback arrived in the Hammett Award–winning The Nearest Exit when the Department of Tourism was … Department of Tourism was almost completely wiped out as the result of an even more insidious plot.
Following on the heels of these two spectacular novels comes An American Spy, Olen Steinhauer’s most stunning thriller yet. With only a handful of “tourists” CIA-trained assassins left, Weaver would like to move on and use this as an opportunity to regain a normal life, a life focused on his family. His former boss in the CIA, Alan Drummond, can’t let it go. When Alan uses one of Milo’s compromised aliases to travel to London and then disappears, calling all kinds of attention to his actions, Milo can’t help but go in search of him.
Worse still, it’s beginning to look as if Tourism’s enemies are gearing up for a final, fatal blow.
With An American Spy, Olen Steinhauer, by far the best espionage writer in a generation, delivers a searing international thriller that will settle once and for all who is pulling the strings and who is being played.
An American Spy is one of The New York Times Notable Books of 2012.
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Another excellent, interesting installment in the series. I thoroughly enjoyed this spy/espionage/thriller.
This time, it’s not just Milo Weaver in the hot seat…
The third-in-series continues to bring the action, but it spreads the story around among the characters a bit more – which I enjoyed, although Milo remains (BY FAR) my favorite focal point. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like the way it was organized, once I realized how it worked: basically you run through a stretch of time with a focus on one character’s perspective and the things they knew. In the next section you shift focus to another character, with backtracking, time-overlap, and time moving forward. It was a novel way of filling in the gaps and a touch confusing at first but by the time I reached the final section I realized I really liked it because it made the revelations trickle in and the deceptions and secrets and lies and half-truths all the more compelling for their slow reveal…
The conspiracies, deception, and behind-the-scenes-battle-waging were even more intensely interwoven this time – which was no small feat, given the first two books. There were definitely things I didn’t see coming, and the while the action may have been less intense, the emotional impact of the decisions being made by the major players certainly was not.
This one ended a lot more abruptly than I normally like, and if it weren’t for the fact that I know the next book is coming out in six months, I’d have been very irritated by the ending – particularly if I read this one when it was originally released in 2012. It stops, rather than ends, with a ton of things left unfinished as though they were interrupted, mid-sentence. It’s an odd way to end the book and then wait 7 years to write the next installment… Still, new readers like me don’t have to wait that long, which is excellent news.
This is a fantastic series – gritty and snarky and full of crosses, double-crosses, and triple-crosses. It reads like Cold War spy thrillers in the classic Nelson deMille vein – which is one of my highest compliments in espionage stories. I cannot WAIT for the fourth book to come out next spring!
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation – free review copy.
I have always thought Olen Steinhauer is one of the best spy novelists out there, and The Last Tourist really cinches that opinion. If you have never read him, get The Tourist and read all four of that series. It’s fantastic.
This is the third book in the Milo Weaver Series. I did not read the first two books in the series and was able to keep up but it would have been more enjoyable if I had. If you like spy mysteries, this is one of the best I’ve read. The author is very accomplished and spins a great story. The characters are engaging and well-developed. This book is hard to put down once you start reading. I read a free copy via Net Galley and voluntarily chose to review it.
Well, I left book 2 in the Milo Weaver series with a so-so feeling and wasn’t sure if I was going to continue. Obviously, I decided to try one more time, and my experience with this one made up my mind. The thing that stood out most was that Milo is barely included in this one, which is odd to me since this is supposed to be his series. However, that was not the clincher for me. In fact, I’ve never managed to quite warm up to Milo, and the lack of any real character development in this one didn’t do much to change my feelings for him. The story is repetitive. So much so that this book could’ve been a much shorter read without repeated play by plays of scenes that have already happened. It felt a bit like a sports play being aired from different perspectives, which would’ve been okay had it not happened so often. Then we have quite a lot of characters, some who would come in briefly only to pop back up much later, leaving me to flip back through the book to remind myself of who they were. Finally, the story was seriously convoluted, which is saying something, considering the genre. In the end, I think it’s a safe bet that this series is not for me, and I won’t be continuing with Milo Weaver.
A Hungarian intelligence agent notices that Henry Gray (American spy? Journalist?) has disappeared. His girlfriend says he was kidnapped by US or Chinese agents, and Henry is also somehow connected to secret intelligence agent (also called a Tourist) Milo Weaver.
If you like Robert Ludlum’s books, you’ll love this one. There are tangled plots, you can’t tell who’s the good guy and who’s he bad guy, it’s unclear what the plans are and who is actually involved, all by design to keep you on the edge of your seat and turning pages. Just one caveat…you may need to take notes or read it twice to understand all the nuances!
I have never read a book by Olen Steinhauer but this is a great spy thriller! So very fast moving and believable. There was never a dull moment with all the twists and turns in it. Thanks for the great read!