Review by New York Times Review
SPY novels function with our complicity. We know bad things happen in the world; in some ways, they have to happen in order for us to enjoy ice cream sundaes and ham sandwiches and spring mornings in Palm Beach. That's the unspoken deal we make with ourselves when we accept their premise. it works well for us when the subject is a clear target on a clean road: Secret files missing. Agent gone bad. Double agent blown. Good guys here. Bad guys there. But when a spy novel reels from espionage to murder mystery to love story gone sour, forcing you to spin back pages to check names as if you're thumbing through the phone directory, the story becomes less of a novel and more of a grocery list of action items. The book becomes more of a guessing game or puzzle and less of a story, and then it's time to reach for the remote. That's the handicap represented by the latest offering from the spymaster Olen Steinhauer, "A Cairo Affair," a work that will surely have his fans clamoring for more - and the rest of us trying to figure out a nice way to reach for the bar bill and exit. It's not that it's a bad book. It's just that the handicaps to reading it loom pretty large. The story begins at two very distant points, clearly destined to intersect later on. At the top, a low-level Libyan-American C.I.A. operative, Jibril Aziz, discovers that five "politically active Libyan exiles" have suddenly vanished from the planet, presumably dragged across the quit line somewhere as yet unknown. He makes this discovery two days after Libya's Feb. 17,2011, Day of Revolt, and quickly comes to suspect that a long ignored and now dangerously irrelevant plan he'd once hatched to muster up Qaddafi insurgents for a planned overthrow - a plan called Stumbler - has been put into action. He gets the nod from his boss to go overseas and check on it, with a wink to keep the trip off the books. And then he proceeds to withdraw from the action for quite a long time. We see him later, of course, in an ancillary fashion, but like many of the characters in this plot-driven novel, he services the story and not the other way around. He's there for a specific purpose, to carry the bucket of plot - screws, nuts, bolts, washers, whatever's there - to its next destination. A majority of the hauling falls to the book's true protagonist, Sophie Kohl, whom we meet next. Sophie's tenuous 20-year marriage to her fellow Harvard grad Emmett is on the rebound. She goes to dinner with her husband, a career diplomat who is now a deputy United States consul in Budapest. During dinner, he confronts her about an extramarital affair she had in Cairo, where they'd lived during his last posting. She confesses. A few minutes later, a gunman appears and Emmett is horribly and inexplicably murdered. And off we go. Sophie decides to step into the world of espionage to hunt down the killer. You can suspend a lot of disbelief in any novel. I do it all the time in my own books - heck, in my own life, which, when I think of it, is full of the same tricks I throw into my books: phonies you pretend to like but don't, broke musicians willing to do anything to make a dollar change pockets, jokes that aren't funny, bums who should be rich and rich guys who should be bums. But no matter how the cut comes or goes, I simply can't imagine a white, middle-aged Harvard graduate, a woman who's been living the soft diplomatic life for 20 years, wandering into the mess of the Middle East during one of its most violent periods, which just increases the level of harassment and abuse women already experience over there, to find her husband's murderer - just after her husband has eaten a bullet from some horribly efficient Albanian assassin who walked up to him in a French restaurant and removed half his face. Even the most guilt-ridden widow from, say, a Good State School, would take the common-sense route: bury him first and twist in bed for a year, monkey around teaching in a convent or volunteering at a community center. Or travel the world with the dough they had holed up. Or fool around some other way, before gutting up to the truth that her affair might have, at least on the surface, had something to do with his death. It's hard to understand Steinhauer's decision to set Sophie in motion this way. He's a gifted writer, eminently capable of powering characters from one scene to the next. He displays superb research talents, and he can push the inner workings of his characters against their outer actions with seeming ease. But "The Cairo Affair" is written in the tight space between WikiLeaks revelations and Arab Spring headlines, and it jumps wildly around in order to make the plot work - back 20 years here, a few days ahead there. Back. Forth. Here, there, everywhere. There are too many characters, too many situations, too many scenes swallowed up by a back story that feels hastily shoved into place so the pieces will fit and the puzzle make sense. The overall effect is like sitting through one of those new super duper jazz concerts where the band kicks off at 7 p.m., three hours go by, then you look at your watch and it's only 7:15. You want to ask the guy sitting next to you the name of the song, but you don't want to look stupid. So you sit there, waiting for the melody to come along. Lots of music, lots of riffs, but, alas, no melody. If there's a song in this book, it's a song of the Middle East, where a good deal of this story takes place. For too many Americans, too much of the world is a mystery. The Middle East seems to be constantly sucked into the ever widening ball of puff and smoke that passes for American news - and then it vanishes, only to reappear with the next round of violence. We need writers to explain this world to us, so we can learn about our neighbors and the places they inhabit, learn to love the sound of their names, the places they live in, the food they eat, the people they care about. In that regard, Steinhauer is first rate. His Egyptian characters are refreshing, particularly the 60-year-old spy Omar Halawi, a sympathetic, multidimensional and daring agent of cool efficiency and conviction. Other solid portrayals include an American security contractor and a ruthless Serbian double agent. But it's the portrayals of Omar, his wife and Omar's underling agents toward the end of the book that are high-level work. Now the story has stopped peeling back layers and simply allowed us to see a good spy at work: his humanity, his morality, his love of his country. We see that we Americans aren't the only ones in this world who love justice. Unfortunately, it takes too long to reach that place. By then, as they say in church, the holy spirit's done come and gone. JAMES MCBRIDE'S most recent book, "The Good Lord Bird," won the 2013 National Book Award for fiction.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 23, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* One of the two best espionage novelists working today, Steinhauer follows his acclaimed Milo Weaver trilogy with a stunning stand-alone that is as emotionally rich as it is layered with intrigue. Budapest, March 2011: career diplomat Emmett Kohl is shot dead in a restaurant, in front of his disbelieving wife, Sophie. Determined to find out why, she follows a trail that leads to the American embassy in a tumultuous Cairo; to the revolution under way in neighboring Libya; to Langley, Virginia; and to her own ill-fated honeymoon in Eastern Europe. It has something to do with Stumbler, a CIA plan for regime change, but, as we shadow a half-dozen key players, the hows and whys prove maddeningly elusive and, in the words of a veteran spy: When you live in a house of mirrors, the only way to stay alive is to believe that every reflection is real. A complex tale of the Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, the CIA, and a marriage, this leaves us with the unsettling feeling that, despite all the information won, lost, hoarded, and put to use, the world of intelligence is no stronger than the fragile, fallible humans who navigate it. It has become de rigeur to compare Steinhauer to le Carre, but it's nearly time to pass the torch: for the next generation, it's Steinhauer who will become the standard by which others are measured. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Given the success of Steinhauer's last three books, the publisher is backing this one with a six-figure marketing campaign and a 150,000-copy print run. Patrons will be asking for it.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Like luxury watchmaker Franck Muller, Olen Steinhauer is the espionage "Master of Complications." The Cairo Affair is an elegant, elaborate clockwork of mystery and deception that should draw readers in and keep them on tenterhooks as they try to figure out what is really making it all tick. It opens in the bowels of CIA headquarters during the Arab Spring. A Libyan-American analyst thinks he sees his previously rejected secret plan to overthrow Gadhafi going operational. But why and how? And who's behind it? Then in a restaurant in Budapest, American diplomat Emmett Kohl is gunned down by a hit man in front of wife, Sophie, just seconds after informing her that he knows all about her affair with a CIA agent last year when they were stationed in Cairo. What can the connection be? In the thick of Arab revolutions, the action toggles from the streets of Cairo to the Libyan Desert to Budapest. Then back in time to 1991, when Emmett and Sophie honeymooned in wartime Yugoslavia. There they met Zora, the mysterious Serbian spymistress, who now has her tentacles around everyone. Steinhauer seduces with the web of falsehoods that the characters spin, in their desperate attempts to stay alive. Nothing is as it seems. "Who trusts anyone these days?" asks the Cairo CIA bureau chief. "Don't take it personally. In a situation like this, everything should be examined, and if you're missing some crucial piece of information, it's best to assume you don't know anything." This is also good advice for the reader. It is how this writer keeps us turning the pages. Steinhauer is often compared to John le Carre. But the comparison does not adequately serve either author. (Is there an homage to le Carre here? No fan of the master could forget his first post-cold-war novel The Night Manager-a doomed affair set in Cairo, with a woman named Sophie. Can this possibly be a coincidence?) Le Carre's books are driven by insoluble moral quandaries. What's more, with his breathtaking insight and economy, le Carre draws his characters from the inside out, making us feel the awful weight of their existential burdens. Steinhauer does make references to the inner lives of his characters, but to this reader they remain superficial-like tweets about their emotions sent from an iPhone. What Steinhauer's writing delivers is adrenalin. The Cairo Affair is the Olympics of Deception. Steinhauer's characters are gold medalists of lying. Watching them deceive one another and themselves is riveting. Whose lies will finally be at the bottom of this dizzying clockwork of interconnected deceits? By the time you reach the end of the book and find out, you will be exhausted and satisfied with the journey. But you will see that the novel is like a Franck Muller watch, a construct of beauty-but metallic and cold. No matter. One marvels at the intricacy of its imagination and the elegance of its maker's craftsmanship. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Company. (Mar.) Glenn Kaplan is the author of Poison Pill and Evil, Inc., a New York Times bestseller (both Tor/Forge). (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Married for 20 years, Emmett and Sophie are a U.S. foreign service couple stationed in Budapest. But when Emmett is shot and killed while dining cozily with Sophie, she flies alone under the radar in a quest to root out his assassin. Early steps take her to Cairo, where old, grievous errors emerge to obstruct her. Tracked by zealous agents from a bewildering array of espionage services, Sophie finds an unlikely ally or two, gleans clues from WikiLeaks, and displays more guts than sense, yet her destiny cannot be averted. She must face a harrowing confrontation with her past. In narrative arcs that vault between a 1991 honeymoon trip to Serbia and a few days in 2011, Steinhauer once again displays his mastery of complex and twisty storytelling. The author of The Tourist and An American Spy excels in the genre of modern espionage fiction because his work resonates with today's headlines, horrors, and fiascos. VERDICT Readers yearning for a fiendishly complex plot, penetrating characterizations, and a new warrior in the ancient struggle between anomie and truth will welcome Sophie and her brash courage. [See Prepub Alert, 9/16/13.]--Barbara -Conaty, Falls Church, VA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In the new novel by the well-traveled Steinhauer (An American Spy, 2012, etc.), the death of an American diplomat in Hungary sets wheels spinning across North Africa. Sophie Kohl hasn't been the best of wives. But when her husband, Emmett, is shot in a Budapest restaurant, her reaction is swift and visceral. Instead of flying his body home to Boston, she bolts to Cairo, the scene of diplomat Emmett's last posting. There, she seeks help from her former lover, Stan Bertolli, in unraveling the drama that led to Emmett's end. Opinion is mixed. Emmett's colleague and Stan's boss, Harry Wolcott, thinks the dead agent sold out his country to Zora Balaevic, who has dirt on him from the youth he misspent among disaffected Serbians in Novi Sad. Stan has more faith in the deceased rival for Sophie's affections. He helps her track down Jibril Aziz, a CIA analyst from Langley who recently appeared in Cairo asking for escort into Libya. The creator of Stumbler, a long-dormant blueprint for the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi, Aziz is convinced that someone has revived his plan at the worst possible moment: just as the Libyans stand poised to rid themselves of the dictator. As the Egyptians cope with their own version of the Arab Spring, more contestants vie for the Betrayal of the Month prize, and the body count climbs. In the end, it's a question of which will win out: misguided nationalism or plain old greed. Could easily dispense with a third of the pages in this le Carr wannabe.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
