Book Reviews
In A Most Wanted Man, the sheer desperation of those whose job it is to prevent another 9/11, another Madrid commuter train, another London Tube attack, is written as a slow-burning fire in every line, and that's what makes it nearly impossible to mark the page and go to sleep. Something said earlier in this review might better be amended. The concept of "best book" is difficult for the writer and reader; there are too many variables. Truer to say that this is le Carre's strongest, most powerful novel, which has a great deal to do with its near perfect narrative pace and the pleasure of its prose, but even more to do with the emotions of its audience, what the reader brings to the book. There the television has once again done its work, has created a reality, and John le Carre has written an extraordinary novel of that reality.
Alan Furst - New York Times Book Review
Le Carre's...secret agents exist in a world of stalemate, moral compromise, ambiguity and betrayal.... Like his books, le Carre is a mix of unblinking realism and hopeful humanism.
Jill Lawless - Associated Press
Intricately plotted, beautifully written, propulsive, morally engaged, but timely as today's headlines.... The protagonists are brilliantly drawn.
Tim Rutten - Los Angeles Times
When boxer Melik Oktay and his mother, both Turkish Muslims living in Hamburg, take in a street person calling himself Issa at the start of this morally complex thriller from le Carre (The Mission Song), they set off a chain of events implicating intelligence agencies from three countries. Issa, who claims to be a Muslim medical student, is, in fact, a wanted terrorist and the son of Grigori Karpov, a Red Army colonel whose considerable assets are concealed in a mysterious portfolio at a Hamburg bank. Tommy Brue, a stereotypical flawed everyman caught up in the machinations of spies and counterspies, enters the plot when Issa's attorney seeks to claim these assets. The book works best in its depiction of the rivalries besetting even post-9/11 intelligence agencies that should be allies, but none of the characters is as memorable as George Smiley or Magnus Pym. Still, even a lesser le Carre effort is far above the common run of thrillers.
Publishers Weekly
When private British bankers Brue Freres took on some unusual clients at the time of the former Soviet Union's collapse, the prospect of terrorist ties or involvement in state security organs was but a dim shadow on the horizon. Now, though, a young and curiously charming Chechen with the marks of torture on his body has arrived as a stowaway in Hamburg and bearing the key to a Brue lockbox. Sheltered by Annabel, a fiery German human rights attorney, the Chechen needs a safe berth. Relying on assumptions of fair dealing, Annabel and Tommy Brue craft a wily deal that protects the refugee and releases the funds. British and German agents act as guarantors of the deal, but no one anticipates the CIA's crashing the party. In le Carre's inimitable way, the individual's striving to do the right thing offers an eloquent but feathery counterweight to the relentless pressure of the "espiocrats," the author's neologism for the new spies operating within the the ethics of expedience. The old spy master hasn't lost his touch. Every public library should order multiple reserve copies. Highly recommended.
Barbara Conaty - Library Journal
Government knaves and compromised idealists duel over the fate of an alleged terrorist in le Carre's latest examination of The Way We Spy Now. A gaunt stranger in a long black overcoat materializes one night near the docks of Hamburg. Calling himself Issa, speaking only Russian, identifying himself as a Chechen Muslim, he attaches himself to Turkish heavyweight champion Melik Oktay, who gives him shelter, and Annabel Richter, the Sanctuary International lawyer who begins the long fight to normalize his position in Germany. The case for deporting Issa is strong. He'd been imprisoned in his homeland, then again in Sweden, where he'd been smuggled before escaping to Hamburg. But Issa holds one trump card. His father, Col. Grigori Borisovich Karpov, was one of a handful of Russian gangsters who opened a Lipizzaner account at the private banking firm of Brue Freres years ago. If Issa claimed the funds due his father, he'd be a rich man. Despite the urging of Annabel and Tommy Brue, the guilt-ridden heir of Brue Freres, Issa doesn't want the money; he only wants to be granted asylum and study medicine. Or is he, as the intelligence agencies of Germany and Britain contend, a jihadist who's arrived in Hamburg to work some frightful act of terror? As Annabel labors to keep Issa hidden from the authorities until she's secured his legal status and Brue struggles to reconcile his commission from his father's criminal clients with the safety of his bank and himself, Gunther Bachmann, of Germany's domestic intelligence service, warily tracks the new arrival, only to find himself under pressure from a pair of clownish but menacing British agents whose deep-laid plans have roots a generation deep. The story can't possibly end well, and it doesn't. But le Carre, without lecturing, deftly puts human faces and human costs on the paranoid response to the threat of terrorism.
Kirkus Reviews