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So someone somewhere recommended this to me, or recommended it while I was listening, or something. It's not awful. It's pure genre, the spy / assassin thriller of trust and betrayal and international intrigue and death and vengeance and all.
I was somewhat bothered by one of the underlying premises: that, decades ago, representatives of all the world's spy agencies got together and set up a network of "safe houses" and "rest homes" where "operatives" from any spy agency, on any side of any given conflict or curtain, could go to rest (for a short time at the safe houses, potentially for a lifetime at the rest homes), and be protected by the combined retribution of all those agencies from attack or murder. Utterly implausible on the face of it, and while I can certainly imagine a potboiler convincing me of it, or at least convincing me to enjoy suspending my disbelief of it, this one didn't do that.
It didn't really have to, in that the premise wasn't really vital to the central story of betrayal and loyalty and revenge. But I was still annoyed.
I was at least as annoyed, though, by a bunch of little things. The author of this novel thinks that heavy things fall faster than light things. He thinks that if you run barefoot across a gravel driveway, jump into a car, and drive off, your feet will bleed copiously all over the pedals. He thinks that a one-night hike over a mountain is a big enough deal to require specially-chosen food, "rock salt" to eat to help the body to retain water, and careful shaving to maintain one's self-respect during the arduous enterprise. He thinks that if an operative asks, at a "safe house" in Bangkok, for the address of a dentist who can be trusted not to ask questions, that operative wouldn't be surprised to be given the address of a dentist in Guatemala.
I mean, come on.
One gets the disturbing impression that maybe authors of thrilling novels about international espionage sometimes -- well -- don't get out much...
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