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.

Six years later, Milo is happily married to a woman whose life he saved, with a six year-old stepdaughter who adores him. 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. Milo, a failed suicide addicted to Dexedrine, has seen too much violence and crime. 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, tracing money stashes in the mountains outside Sarajevo, watching émigré Russians living in extravagant style abroad, and looking for three million dollars thought to have been stolen by Frank Dawdle, the CIA station chief in Slovenia. As Grainger would put it, anyone who could not be embraced or absorbed by the empire was anathema and had to be dealt with, like barbarians at the gate.” The other side was multifaceted: Russian mafias, Chinese industrialization, loose nukes, and even the vocal Muslims camped in Afghanistan who were trying to pry Washington’s fingers off the oil-soaked Middle East. “Angela has said, “There is no other side anymore,” but there was. Over to read a review of The Nearest Exit) Over to read a review of The Cairo Affair)

The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer