The last tourist

Milo Weaver never liked being a Tourist--the code name for the members of an off-the-grid group of CIA-trained assassins--and, finally, after the traumatic events described in The Nearest Exit (2010) and An American Spy (2012)--he thought he'd finally pulled the plug, forming a noninterventionist intelligence-gathering service called the Library. The idea was to use his skills to ferret out what the bad guys were up to and make that information available to the governments affected, thus preventing international carnage rather than causing it. But now it appears the Tourists are back, in a more lethal form, and Milo is the presumed ringleader, wanted by his own former employees. After convincing a naive but deceptively shrewd CIA analyst that he, Milo, is being set up, Milo gathers his shrinking crew of allies and sets out to bring the new Tourists down, using the only weapon at his disposal, the Library's encrypted files. What follows is a byzantine tale of alliances formed and discarded, double crosses tripled and quadrupled, in which "corporations are the new nation-states," with their own armies. Like John le Carré's Agent Running in the Field (2019), Steinhauer pits a disenchanted agent, an ideologue no more, against the new evil empire, multinational corporations for whom "money knows no borders." It's not a fair fight, but Milo is a hell of a counterpuncher, and we love rooting for him.

A decade ago, the CIA's Department of Tourism, a corps of highly trained assassins, went defunct, but now something similar has emerged from its ruins in bestseller Steinhauer's stunning fourth thriller featuring ex-CIA operative Milo Weaver (after 2012's An American Spy). As chief of the Library, a stealthy espionage operation buried within the UN's bureaucracy, Weaver has been attempting to serve as a reasonably honest broker of sensitive information, but a series of increasingly violent assaults drives him into hiding in the Western Sahara. Milo eventually figures out that he's being pursued by a darkly plausible, utterly ruthless assassins corps created by multinational corporations acting beyond the reach of any country's laws to lock down global dominance. No dummies survive in this twisty shadow realm, and Weaver's wits keep him alive as the complex, layered plot reaches a shrewd, nuanced climax at the World Economic Forum, leaving the reader with the hope that global elites can't rig the rules of every game. The author does a masterly job of evoking dingy desert cities and the rarified air of Davos, Switzerland. Steinhauer reinforces his position at the top of the espionage genre. 125,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Co. (Mar.)