Why, We Were Just Talking About Charles McCarry

Patrick Anderson of the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram reviews Old Boys, the novel that begins with news of the death of Charles McCarry's master spy, Paul Christopher, then snowballs into a caper where jihadists who might have some stray Russian nukes and would love to get their hands on a document that could've come straight out of Irving Wallace's The Word--which just happens to have passed through the hands of Reinhard Heydrich... In lesser hands this could have been a crappy potboiler, but McCarry brings a strongly honed sensibility to the material and manages to make it all seem credible. It took me a couple dozen subway rides to get to the end, but I was always hooked. Book of Joe says, "I believe that Charles McCarry is the best American writer of spy and espionage fiction working today." With the exception of a good argument to be made for Alan Furst, I don't have much reason to doubt that assessment.