-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Graham Weber has been the director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents' names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads.
Weber turns to a charismatic (and unstable) young man named James Morris who runs the Internet Operations Center. He's the CIA's in-house geek. Weber launches Morris on a mole hunt unlike anything in spy fiction - one that takes the reader into the hacker underground of Europe and America and ends up in a landscape of paranoia and betrayal. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it's drawn, The Director is a maze of deception and double dealing, about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones and nothing can be trusted. The CIA has belatedly discovered that this is not your father's Cold War, and Weber must play catch-up, against the clock and an unknown enemy, in a game he does not yet understand.
"Starred Review. Ignatius builds palpable momentum and creates engaging, fully human characters, notably the fallible and conscientious Weber." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Ignatius...effectively outlines a plausible hack that rocks the entire world economy. He's given readers another compelling and enlightening look at what might happen next month. Must-read twenty-first-century espionage fiction." - Booklist
"While Ignatius's earlier works are more compelling in their geopolitical impact, this thriller engages the reader deeply in the arcana of cyber trade craft." - Library Journal
"Although the subject is timely, Ignatius wades too far into the mechanics of malicious computer use to make this a compelling tale; he turns an exciting idea into a story that fails under the weight of dull and irrelevant detail." - Kirkus
"Another brilliant thriller from the Dean of International Intrigue. Deception, deceit, and dishonor - The Director doesn't let up and absolutely doesn't disappoint! I loved this book!" - Brad Thor, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Hidden Order
"The best part of The Director is watching Ignatius grab the history of American intelligence and use it to divine our technological future. Here's your chance to see inside the CIA. Sculpted with an insider's eye, The Director shows you real people, real espionage, and the real threats to our national security." - Brad Meltzer, best-selling author of The Fifth Assassin
This information about The Director 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.
David Ignatius is a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.
If you liked The Director, try these:
The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures
by Jennifer Hofmann
Published 2020
An audacious debut that combines spycraft, betrayals, and reversals to show that sometimes it's the secret that destroys you.
by Olen Steinhauer
Published 2010
Milo Weaver used to be a “tourist” for the CIA—an undercover agent with no home, no identity. But when the arrest of an assassin exposes new layers of intrigue in his old cases, he has no choice but to go back undercover and find out who’s holding the strings once and for all.
by Joseph Weisberg
Published 2009
A former CIA case officer’s novel about two embattled spies who go to extraordinary lengths to keep their informants out of harm’s way, published as vetted by the agency itself.
Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
