The Tourist

The Tourist
by Olen Steinhauer

The Tourist
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Book Summary Information

Author: Olen Steinhauer
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2009-03-03
ISBN: 0312369727
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Minotaur Books
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Book Reviews of The Tourist

Book Review: Your Typical Modern Spy Thriller
Summary: 3 Stars

I'm not sure why I still bother to read any modern espionage books -- they never seem rise above decent beach reads (like Dead Spy Running), and all-to-often wind up being miserable duds (like A Most Wanted Man). This falls somewhere in my ambivalent middle, a serviceable, but ultimately disposable tale of yet another weary warrior in the game of shadows. Here, the spy is Milo, whom we meet in an opening section set in pre-9/11 Europe, where he works as a "tourist" (ie. black ops agent) for the CIA. Faced with the meaningless life of the post-Cold War, pre-War on Terror spy, he flirts with suicide. It's a bit of a shock then, when the next section opens some six years later with him as a desk jockey in the CIA's Manhattan office, where he collates reports from current "tourists" into intelligence. More impressively, he seems to have forged a new life as husband and father, with the obligatory Park Slope home.

The complicated plot defies summary, but involves a legendary hit man Milo has been tracking for years, bureaucratic battles between the CIA and Homeland Security, a dead agent or two in Europe, missing millions, Chinese interest in African oil, a Russian pedophile, another apparently benevolent Russian, a vacation to Disneyland, Milo's dead revolutionary mother, plenty of double-crossing, and a possible mole at the CIA. Steinhauer does a reasonably good job of keeping all these balls in the air, although the story slips inexorably toward the rather tired "wanted by his own people" plot. And on it slogs through the familiar spy tropes: Whom can Milo trust? Whose identities are real, and whose are false? Who's behind it all and why?

To the author's credit, he doesn't dumb down the material, and relies on the reader's ability to keep track of the rival interests of a decent-sized cast, many of whom are sporting multiple aliases. Alas, the most crucial secret of all, the one secret that is meant to be the big reveal at the end, is going to be glaringly obvious to most readers who are paying attention. There's a moment in the first third of the book that should trigger a question in the reader along the lines of "Wait a minute, how did he learn to ____?" The only answer that makes sense is the one that's revealed at the end, so for me, the payoff falls kind of flat -- especially if we're meant to believe that no one else in the story ever stopped to ask that question.

So, it's not a bad book, but neither is it a good one. There are some nice action set pieces, as well as some nice dialogue scenes, and the locations are all well described. However, none of the characters move beyond being types, and the entire enterprise lacks life. I've heard this may be turned into a film at some point, and I suspect that if done right, this might be one of those rare cases where the film is better than the book, as the right directors and actors might be able to inject a note of originality into this lukewarm tale.

Summary of The Tourist

Milo Weaver used to be a "tourist" for the CIA-an undercover agent with no home, no identity-but he's since retired from the field to become a middle-level manager at the CIA's New York headquarters. He's acquired a wife, a daughter, and a brownstone in Brooklyn, and he's tried to leave his old life of secrets and lies behind. However, when the arrest of a long-sought-after assassin sets off an investigation into one of Milo's oldest colleagues and exposes new layers of intrigue in his old cases, he has no choice but to go back undercover and find out who's holding the strings once and for all.

In The Tourist, Olen Steinhauer---twice nominated for an Edgar Award---tackles an intricate story of betrayal and manipulation, loyalty and risk in an utterly compelling novel that is both thoroughly modern and yet also reminiscent of the espionage genre's luminaries: Len Deighton, Graham Greene, and John LeCarr?.

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