Customer Reviews

Sleeper Spy

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

After years of reading spy novels, I had kinda given up on the genre. My wife bought _Sleeper Spy_ for me (and, honestly, I only read it because I had run out of other reading material). I was very, very pleasantly surprised. Safire spins a thoroughly engaging tale of espionage, duplicity, violence and deception - and that's only the part dealing with the media! The spying game gets even more intense. One gets the sense that Safire is relating many instances of his real experiences reporting on the inner workings of the beltway. The genre rarely gets more realistic - or more satisfying. Well done, Bill!

The BEST spy story I have read in 5 years. Safire does it all - intricate plotting, sparkling dialogue (no padding to just fill up pages) - characters that are interesting and that you care for (the good guys) and characters that you can hate with a passion (the bad guys). I started ( but never finished) FREEDOM in 1987 - now I am going to back to it and complete it. If you like TERRIFIC prose, you will LOVE this book. Safire has a way with words that is incomparable

One of the few spy novels which moves along at an even pace, includes the usual surprises but none of the fake romances, chases, and other usually contrived events designed to get the best movie deal. At last, a satisfying ending-one that seems to evolve from the story line and not just to end a book at 500 or 600 or whatever pages. The main character, however, is not a likeable person

This book definitely is not in the same league as others in its genre. I found it to be predictable and somewhat boring. There was no evident chemistry between that main characters but they somehow get together in the end.

I just finish this book and it was pretty entertaining. But I think that in some areas that were to confusing, it seemed like the whole objective of Mr. Safire is to misdirect the reader and not sticking with the plot. I think the main problem that this book has is too many character. If the book just concentrated on a couple of characters it would be a lot better.

Weaving an engaging and capitivating spy story may require an extraordinary effort for many -- especially if the story tries to take you on a "good ride," by offering believable characters with substance, and a compelling plot. Safire starts with a wonderful concept -- finding a deeply burried spy (a compelling concept.) He did get my attention.

Regretably after reading the first 150 pages, and even with a compelling concept, I was unable to complete the book. The main characters were predictable and lacking of any depth, and the dialogue cache if not contrived. Perhaps,if the predicatability of the dialogue and characters could have been overlooked, Safire may have told an wonderfully interesting story. Unfortunately, I wasnt able to come to this conclusion since I couldn't take it any more after the first 150 pages.

The book should have been called sleep inducing. Blah Blah Blah, basically what we have here is a 350 page boring column about how we should always hate the Russians and maybe anybody else not American. I came away after reading half of the book, that he just pulled up the average character list for a spy book and put them in with no additional work, they were so light that you could see through them. This was a good story line, he just completely ruined it by trying to hide a Pat Buchanan book in the fiction section. Save your time and money.

For Chrissake, the author is a Russophobic hatemonger! Mr. Safire is as objective writing about Russians (spies or not) as a skinhead writing about the Holocaust.