Secret Lovers: A Paul Christopher Novel

By Charles McCarry

Book Overview

The Secret Lovers is a McCarry tale at its finest- an exploration of the spying game, but also a riveting psychological portrait of a man ensnared by his own profession. A courier delivers a dissident Russian manuscript to Paul Christopher early one morning in West Berlin; minutes later, the courier is dead. Meanwhile in Rome, Christopher's wife takes a lover to stir her husband out of his stoicism. These two seemingly discrete events set in motion a spiral of Cold War intrigue, both personal and political, that leads Christopher from Europe to the Congo. In this relentlessly suspenseful novel, McCarry, who "surpasses Len Deighton and John le Carre" (Washington Post), builds his multilayered story to a outstandingly satisfying end.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 146830108X
• ISBN13: 9781468301083
• Release Date: November 2012
• Publisher: Overlook Press
• Length: 308 Pages
• Weight: 5.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 7.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

i wonder if mccarry knew her

found this book in the dollar section of the local library charity bin, lost it on the plane, went through security to retrieve it, and that was after 25 pages. secret lovers, seductive title for my bookcase, but once you understand the secrets are spies, and real ones, the lovers and what their need for secrets create has stayed with me for years, images constant, and i see daniel craig as paul christopher, too bad for the timing, but still looking for my cathy. this gives dinner party talk a new spin, kennedy conspiracy and the gulag! and i believe it ...

None Better - but read before listening to it!

The Secret Lovers by McCarry is a cold-eyed but fully engaged odessey of love, the emotional and analytical paths of betrayal and its unraveling, and the imitation of life that is tradecraft. If you found a lifetime of enjoyment in LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (i.e., if you re-read it every few years just to spend a day with an old friend) you will find the same kind of unforgetable stories and characters in this novel, only a few more of them, and most of them a little more developed. McCarry's literary voice (think Scott Fitzgerald to LeCarre's Dickens), his empathic but not the least bit co-dependent connection to his characters, and his ability to remind us that his complete novel is just a few weeks in their busy lives, reminds us that greatness is a quantum leap from the ordinary. The Secret Lovers will stand with Tinker Tailor, and with Erje Ayden's almost unknown Sadness at Leaving, as a masterpiece of a time that is both past and, like the human needs for conflict and resoltion, timeless. This is a book for those for whom printed words on a page have far more power than images on a screen, or probably, for the recorded voice reading them aloud.

Simply Outstanding!

Spies, Russian authors, infidelity, indifference, you name it, you got it. I enjoyed the book very much. McCarry has a subtle way of dealing with spy craft that is different than other writers. Great intrigue.

From inside flap:

Set in 1960 at the peak of the cold war, the story turns on the smuggling of a vital manuscript out of Moscow. At dawn in Berlin, covert action officer Paul Christopher rendezvouses with the agent carrying the manuscript to the West. Minutes later, the courier is killed by a hit-and-run driver. And the questions begin. Who killed the courier, but, most of all, why?

Pretty good Cold War spy novel

A spy novel written in the 1970s. A CIA officer investigates a murder which reaches back to the Spanish Civil War. Turns out some of his contemporaries were Communist sympathizers (similiar to Kim Philby) who became Soviet spies. Another was a devout Catholic who sided with Franco to oppose the Reds. Meanwhile, this CIA officer hero must also struggle with the challenge of maintaining a happy marriage. His rich young wife is bored and dissatisfied by his constant foreign travel & intrigue.This is a fairly entertaining and well-researched Cold War spy novel, and the domestic side story is engaging without overwhelming the main spy story.