Another fun read by Charles McCarry. Found a hardcover copy of this one at a used book sale for only 2 bucks and snapped it up. At 558 pages I was a little intimidated to begin, so it sat around a while. I'm not one to read "Political Thrillers" either, which also didn't get me to rush to it.W...
In his afterword, Charles McCarry swears this novel isn't meant to be about any real-life politicians at all, but readers may be forgiven if the character of a philandering governor (who avoided getting drafted and sent to Vietnam) on a fast track to the presidency sounds familiar. The novel's pr...
In a presidential election year, a liberal was pitted against a die-hard conservative in a political race that turned to a race of death. A cast of flambouyant characters including a TV anchorman, a radical beauty, a British operative, and a computer whiz all knew a bit of the truth that could sh...
”There are dogs and kids, great books and great paintings and good music all over the White House,” he said. “It’s human again, the way it must have been under Franklin Roosevelt.” The power of John F. Kennedy didn’t just rest in his Hollywood good looks, or his youthful vibrancy or his beautifu...
It is the late 1930s, and young Christopher and his family are struggling against the rise of Nazi totalitarianism in Berlin. As he wrestles with a doomed love affair, he bears witness to an unspeakable atrocity committed by a remorseless SS officer.
Second Sight is seventh in the series that follows the legendary spy Paul Christopher-a man ensnared by a line of work that never failed to exert its insidious influence outside professional boundaries. Now retired and living the quiet life as a loving husband in Washington, D.C., Christopher h...
Charles McCarry has been writing his Paul Christopher novels for forty years. I've read several of the novels over the past twenty-eight years - going back to high school. When I started the series I was a teenager and the Soviet Union still existed. Both are now gone, but Charles McCarry is stil...
Paul Christopher was a cool, urbane American mixed up with a comical Polish exile, a beautiful Hungarian seductress, and an African prince with a lust for women and power. It was up to Christopher to discover who was who in this sticky international mess.
Cerutti recited history. “The Pré Catelan is named for a court minstrel, murdered here in the fourteenth century,” he said. “One pays in the end for making jokes about the king.” Now that the recruitment had been completed, there was no need for Christopher to be amused by...
She and I had been invited to the glass house in the Grenadines for the holidays. Doors and windows were open, admitting the sea breeze. Brilliant sunlight flooded the dining room. Millions of earthquakes occur each year, Henry said, though only a million and a half or s...
The music activated a mental slide show—Mei in daylight, Mei in the dark. To pass the time I played solitaire on the laptop. By setting the level of difficulty at “beginner” I managed to win 8 percent of my games. The computer refuses to be cheated, and that takes away a lot of the fun of the gam...
You didn’t waste any time in Bogotá.” We were alone—no Tom, seemingly nobody at all in the empty, hushed building. Amzi’s wall of clocks said it was 3:41 A.M. Eastern Standard Time. He was wide-awake. I was dead tired. Amzi’s secretary had called me while my flight was taxiing to the gate after l...
She and Jack drove this underpowered death trap to Columbus. Within a week of arrival they had secured a mortgage on a modest bungalow near the Ohio State campus. It closely resembled the little house in which Danny and Cindy lived nearby. With a certain sense of dread—remember, at this time we k...
I discussed these with the Old Boys. We had plenty of money in the bank—almost $900,000, plus a few thousand left over from the $25,000 advanced to each of us at the beginning of the operation. These weren’t government funds, meant to be scattered to the winds before the end of the fiscal year. I...
He was sentenced to “death with twenty years’ suspension of execution and solitary forced labor with observation of the results.” “What exactly does that mean?” Patchen asked the Chinese intelligence officer who brought him the news. They faced each other across a table la...