Spy'S Life, A - Hardcover

Porter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743215605 ISBN 13: 9780743215602

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Synopsis

Moments after a mysterious air crash at La Guardia Airport, a cell phone rings out from the wreckage in the East River. Stunned and half dead from cold and drowning, the lone survivor, Robert Harland, wades to the remains of an airline seat where his old friend from the CIA lies dead. He snatches the phone from the body, knowing that it is his only hope of being rescued from the rising tide. This is the first act in a journey of survival for the former British spy who, in the twelve years since he was tortured during the Velvet Revolution, has made a new life for himself in the Red Cross and later as a water expert for the United Nations. The crash of the UN plane wrenches him back to his past. Was it sabotage, and if so, was Harland the target or someone else? And what has it got to do with the broadcast of coded signals by certain European radio stations? The authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are urgently seeking answers and everyone suspects that Harland is the only one who can supply them. He is tailed through Manhattan and attacked in UN headquarters. Someone wants him dead, but they also want his knowledge. And as if to confirm his previous life has come to haunt him, another ghost from his past rises -- the mother of a young man who now claims to be his son. This is just the beginning of Henry Porter's riveting new novel about a lone man, scarred by love and the patient sadism of his torturer, confronting his deepest secrets and fears. Ingeniously plotted and paced, Porter's novel hurtles from New York to Eastern Europe and to the killing grounds of a forgotten war. It propels the flawed and human hero through a labyrinth of suspicion and secrecy, wherenothing and no one are what they seem. A Spy's Life is how the intelligence world really is, rendered unflinchingly in the history of one unforgettable individual.

About this title

Review:

Henry Porter's A Spy's Life surpasses even its predecessor Remembrance Day, which achieved an unprecedented amount of enthusiastic word of mouth. Here, he brilliantly blends the thriller elements into a bizarre and surrealistic narrative that constantly surprises the reader.

A massive air crash in New York kills 19 people, most of them working for the United Nations. The only survivor is a British ex-spy, Robert Harland. After a traumatic encounter with torture in Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution, he is now working for the UN in a low-key, non-espionage role. Anyone familiar with the genre will know that attempts to retire from the spy trade are always doomed to failure, and Harland's freak survival of the plane crash soon makes him public property again. The FBI and other shadowy forces are keen to find out what he was doing on the plane. And as Harland speedily finds himself in lethal situations again, his life is further complicated by the appearance of a young man claiming to be his son by Eva, a young Czech agent with whom Harland was in love. With a mass murderer called Viktor Lipnik figuring into the equation, the reader is quickly beguiled by the kind of highly dangerous pyrotechnics that distinguished John le Carré's early books. In fact, the influence of le Carré's finest book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, is evident here, and it's a measure of Porter's success that he is more than able to hold his own in this august company. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

Christopher Silvester "Sunday Express" Entirely authentic...Porter has proved that he is a torchbearer in a great tradition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743215605
• ISBN 13: 9780743215602
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400