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69 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
There are tourists, and then there are Tourists..., March 12, 2009
This is, quite simply, the best spy novel I can remember reading in what must be many decades. Daniel Silva, in comparison, is writing books for middle school kids, and even Alan Furst pales slightly in comparison.
This impeccably structured novel revolves around Milo Weaver and his battles for identity and meaning within the world of "Tourism". Forget digital cameras and souvenirs, however; Weaver and his colleagues travel the world on behalf of a clandestine US intelligence agency, combatting global organized crime, terrorists and other miscellaneous enemies of the United States. We first meet Weaver as a burned out shell of a man, whose soul is being destroyed by what the job demands of him. Its early pages dart back and forth across a six-year-timespan, introducing us to key characters in the drama to follow, from fellow Tourists to his boss Tom Grainger, from the woman he loves and marries to the woman whose investigation into the death of a hired killer Weaver has been hunting, nicknamed the Tiger, threatens to derail his fragile happiness.
Each of those characters is carefully drawn and feels as vivid and 'real' as does Milo himself in his struggle to extricate himself from a trap to implicate him in murder and treason. Who orchestrates that conspiracy, for what reason and how it is resolved is at the heart of the plot. Steinhauer never strikes a false note in his writing or cuts corners in the intricate plot. Early on, as Milo muses about his profession, "the truth was that intelligence work seldom, if ever, ran in straight lines. Facts accumulated, many of them useless, some connecting and then disconnecting." Steinhauer, however, keeps each fact relevant, and carefully scatters clues to the novel's denouement along the path that the reader will follow. Never, however, does the outcome feel inevitable or predictable; nor are the clues so opaque that the reader feels frustrated or irritated.
"Tourism is all about storytelling. After a while you collect too many layers. It's hard to discern story from truth." In Steinhauer's capable hands, his story becomes the truth, to such an extent that when I finally put the book down with a sigh of regret, I almost headed off to Avenue of the Americas in search of Weaver's (fictional) Tourism Department headquarters. And I did download a bunch of 1960s and 1970s chanson of the kind that Weaver listens to obsessively to connect himself to the world of love and family even as he must wage a solitary battle in a much darker universe.
If Amazon allowed us to rate this six stars, I'd award them all to this book. Strongly recommended for anyone who enjoys a novel revolving around puzzles and intrigue, but especially for any fans of spy or suspense novels. A noirish tone complements the novel's plot beautifully. The only folks who won't enjoy this are those with a taste for black and white: heroes vs villains, and nary a trace of nuance. This is a book whose author navigates so deftly between those lines that we realize that while Milo may be a hero to us, we also accept sadly that his wife, Tina, is right to see him as a kind of villain.
A tour de force.
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36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Most of the book is people telling you the story line., March 18, 2009
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My first thought in reading this book was the characters are too stereotyped. A married CIA agent in a bad marriage, his long suffering wife, his fatherly boss, the bad administrator trying to take over and so on. And of course CIA itself. Why must every CIA agent be in a bad marriage, is it a spy novel rule? There are numerous subplots, and the names to go with them, so that it gets confusing at times to remember is this Russian the good one or the bad one, how about this agent? The subplots often don't seem to add to the story, just to have more subplots. It doesn't help that you read a few paragraphs of a chapter before you realize its either set before or after the last chapter.
The book often reminded me of the show Burn Notice, when the author would say things such as "when you're a spy you learn to look for the exits when you first enter a building". I even found myself using the Burn Notice character, Michael Weston's voice when reading.
My main criticisms are, too much of the book was simply two people talking to each other, for example during an interrogation, to explain or extend or rehash the plot. By the time you get to the last rehash it becomes just brutal to get through as you are on page 400. The ending was about what you would predict, no surprises, no insight. The last interrogation leading to the ending just seems unrealistic. The main antagonist was able to manipulate everyone yet falls for a simple ploy anyone can see through. The ending is an anti-climax, no climax at all.
I'm sorry, but to compare this to John le Carre, like the cover of the book does, seems more publisher's hype than reality.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"It was a miserable job; it was a miserable life.", March 25, 2009
In the post-Cold War days immediately prior to 9/11, Milo Weaver, a "tourist" for the CIA--an agent without a home base--dealt with issues like finding war criminals, watching émigré Russians living an extravagant style abroad, and looking for three million dollars thought to have been stolen by Frank Dawdle, the CIA station chief in Slovenia. Milo, a failed suicide addicted to Dexedrine, has seen too much violence and crime. Watching a Russian pedophile throw a thirteen-year-old girl off a balcony in Venice, seeing an influential CIA man betray his country, and being shot and nearly killed when that agent is murdered by another "tourist," has just about done him in.
Six years later, Milo is happily married to a woman whose life he saved, with a six year-old stepdaughter who adores him. Though he is no longer a "tourist," he is still working for the CIA, investigating "The Tiger," one of the most vicious killers in the world, an equal-opportunity assassin who has killed, among others, both an influential cleric in the Sudan and the French foreign minister. No one knows for whom he works. When Milo tracks him down, he learns that the Tiger has actually planned their meeting, deliberately leaving a trail for him because he wants to meet him. The Tiger wants Milo to find and kill the man who has commissioned all the international killings--and ultimately, the man who has arranged for the Tiger's own death.
The evolving action reveals much about the internecine squabbles within the CIA, between the CIA and Homeland Security, and between Congressmen and both organizations. The number of betrayals is astonishing, high level agents with personal rather than national agendas, double agents, agents who sell out each other, and trained agents who disappear to assume new identities and freelance on a global scale--for a fee. Homeland Security and the CIA distrust each other, and key information is not shared. Congressmen sometimes run their own investigations, and no one can be trusted.
As this intricately constructed novel moves back and forth in time, the reader must constantly consider several basic issues: Who is the Tiger? Who is Milo? And, finally, is the information that the author provides about these and other characters reliable, or is the author himself acting as a "double agent"? The reader must constantly act as a "tourist" here, accumulating hints but not knowing much definite information about Milo and other main characters until well into the novel. While this involves the reader in the action, the lack of certainty about some characters keeps them (especially Milo), at arm's length. Numerous aliases for important characters occasionally lead to confusion. Still, the novel is exciting as Steinhauer capably unites disparate threads to keep the suspense high and his readers involved. n Mary Whipple
The Bridge of Sighs: A Novel
Liberation Movements
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