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An American Spy: Book summary and reviews of An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer

An American Spy

A Milo Weaver Novel

by Olen Steinhauer

An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer X
An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer
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  • Published Mar 2012
    400 pages
    Genre: Thrillers

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Book Summary

In Olen Steinhauer's bestseller The Tourist, reluctant CIA agent Milo Weaver uncovered a conspiracy linking the Chinese government to the highest reaches of the American intelligence community, including his own Department of Tourism - the most clandestine department in the Company. The shocking blowback arrived in the Hammett Award-winning The Nearest Exit when the Department of Tourism was almost completely wiped out as the result of an even more insidious plot.

Following on the heels of these two spectacular novels comes An American Spy, Olen Steinhauer's most stunning thriller yet. With only a handful of "tourists" - CIA-trained assassins - left, Weaver would like to move on and use this as an opportunity to regain a normal life, a life focused on his family. His former boss in the CIA, Alan Drummond, can't let it go. When Alan uses one of Milo's compromised aliases to travel to London and then disappears, calling all kinds of attention to his actions, Milo can't help but go in search of him.

Worse still, it's beginning to look as if Tourism's enemies are gearing up for a final, fatal blow.

With An American Spy, Olen Steinhauer, by far the best espionage writer in a generation, delivers a searing international thriller that will settle once and for all who is pulling the strings and who is being played.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. [H]is ability to create characters with genuine emotions and conflicts, coupled with an insightful and often poetic writing style, set him apart in the world of espionage fiction." - Publishers Weekly

"Starred Review." - Booklist

"This follow-up to The Tourist and The Nearest Exit proves the adage that good things come in threes... A mesmerizing series for dedicated readers of spy fiction." - Library Journal

This information about An American Spy was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Don Schimpff

An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer
I thought it to be a very dull and uninteresting read. I had to force myself to finish it, but I did and even the ending was BLAH. The book was so dull that I was compelled to write this account of my reaction to it.

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Author Information

Olen Steinhauer Author Biography

Photo: Nancy Crampton

Olen Steinhauer grew up in Virginia, and has lived throughout the US and Europe. He spent a year in Romania on a Fulbright grant, an experience that helped inspire his first five books. He now splits his time between Hungary and New York with his wife and daughter.

His first novel, The Bridge of Sighs (2003), began a five-book sequence chronicling Cold War Eastern Europe, one book per decade. It was nominated for five awards. The rest of the sequence includes: The Confession, 36 Yalta Boulevard (The Vienna Assignment in the UK), Liberation Movements (The Istanbul Variations in the UK)—this one was nominated for an Edgar Award for best novel of the year—and Victory Square, which was a New York Times editor's choice.

With The Tourist (2009), he began a trilogy of spy tales ...

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