OLEN STEINHAUER'S 2009 thriller, "The Tourist," introduced a tantalizing new word to the lexicon of espionage fiction. Steinhauer's "Tourists" are members of a tiny fraternity of C.I.A. operatives who move ceaselessly around the world, cultivating informers, ferreting out double agents and assassinating America's enemies. Like black-ops versions of Ryan Bingham, the corporate hit man played by George Clooney in "Up in the Air," these covert agents exist unencumbered by relationships or a home. The novel's main character, Milo Weaver, is a secret operative with multiple identities who has grown sick of the rootlessness, duplicity and amorality of Tourism. One of the few members of the group who are also family men, Weaver longs to settle down in Brooklyn with his librarian wife and 6-year-old stepdaughter, but he's drawn back repeatedly into a life of murder and deceit. "The Nearest Exit," Steinhauer's follow-up novel, reprises the themes of "The Tourist," with even more success. As the story begins, Weaver's latest stab at domesticity is cut short when he's dispatched on a mission designed to test his loyalty to the organization. His orders come in "a white spongy envelope" that he opens in a seedy hotel in a bohemian neighborhood of Berlin: "Two photographs, from different angles, of a pretty olive-skinned girl, blonde from a bottle. Girl: 15 years old. Adriana Stanescu, only child of Andrei and Rada Stanescu, Moldovan immigrants. . . . Kill the child, and make the body disappear. He had until the end of the week." Unable to summon the resolve to complete the operation, Weaver arranges a complicated deception. When Adriana is found dead anyway, her body dumped in a forest, Weaver is quickly identified, captured and brutally interrogated by German intelligence agents. Although he manages to exonerate himself, this encounter leads him into the sordid world of human trafficking, a blackmail plot involving German intelligence officials and the search for a mole within the Tourism department. Like John le Carré, with whom he is often compared, Steinhauer skillfully renders the game of espionage in the post-cold-war, post-9/11 era. "The other side was multifaceted," Steinhauer wrote in "The Tourist." "Russian mafias, Chinese industrialization, loose nukes and even the vocal Muslims camped in Afghanistan who were trying to pry Washington's fingers off the oil-soaked Middle East. . . Anyone who could not be embraced or absorbed by the empire was anathema and had to be dealt with, like barbarians at the gates." But the rules of spycraft remain essentially unchanged: almost nothing is what it seems, enemies often masquerade as friends, and those closest to the action are often farthest from the truth. In "The Nearest Exit," Weaver roams Europe trying to unravel half a dozen interlocking conspiracies, wrestling with ambiguities at every turn. Are the "shadows" following him agents of German intelligence? Have they been sent by the Chinese? Or is a devious United States senator keeping tabs on him? Does the mole exist? Or is the entire operation an ingenious illusion meant to sow confusion and fear among the Tourists and their deskbound analyst colleagues called Travel Agents? Weaver learns that even his own identity has been stolen to serve the organization's sinister ends: a fellow Tourist, a cold-blooded assassin who derives "real pleasure in planning a murder," has employed it to eliminate a nosy reporter in Budapest. Weaver traces this strand of the plot to a Hungarian strip club, where he "watched the endless parade of flesh and, though he would soon leave it, hated everything to do with his lousy business." Like le Carré's George Smiley, Weaver is a richly imagined creation with a scarred psyche and a complex back story that elevates him above the status of run-of-the-mill world-weary spook. The son of a former K.G.B. agent and an American member of a Baader-Meinhof-type gang who hanged herself in a Munich prison, Weaver was raised by adoptive parents and recruited by the C.I.A. just after he graduated from college. His father, Yevgeny Primakov, now a United Nations intelligence operative, turns up periodically as a savior, a potential liability - and a reminder that Weaver can't escape his past. Weaver is at once a loving father and a coolly efficient killer. At one moment he's reading his stepdaughter a bedtime story, at another breaking the leg of a pursuer with a lead pipe and forcing the man's boss to listen via cellphone to his victim's screams. The tension between those parallel lives begins to overwhelm him. "In the end Milo Weaver wasn't outside the moral universe, no matter how well the Company had trained him," Steinhauer observes. "He couldn't escape the continual reminders that his universe had become imbued with morality - bathing his infant daughter's fat, squirming body, later walking her to school and listening to her rambling stories, making curry for his wife, vacuuming on the weekends." Steinhauer's tale has its weaknesses. His cardboard villains, including the conspiratorial senator and a Chinese spymaster who may be running the mole, will make readers long for an opponent like Smiley's Karla. Steinhauer also has a tendency to delineate his characters with a few trademark idiosyncrasies, then repeat them over and over, to annoying effect. The unhappy German spymaster Erika Schwartz ("a big woman since the 70s, an obese one since the fall of the Wall") snacks incessantly on Snickers bars and washes them down with bottles of cheap riesling. Weaver's own eccentricities - he pops Dexedrine like Pez, struggles with an addiction to Davidoff cigarettes and carries an iPod loaded with the music of Serge Gainsbourg and David Bowie - sometimes feel more like tacked-on accessories than genuine outgrowths of his personality. Yet these minor drawbacks are far outweighed by Steinhauer's brisk pacing, sharp dialogue and convincing evocation of a paranoid subculture. In a terrifying conclusion, he brings together the myriad aspects of his plot and catches many of his characters - the father of the murdered Moldovan schoolgirl; the man who killed her; the German intelligence officer who hatched the plot; and Milo Weaver himself - in a spasm of violence that passes for a kind of moral reckoning. "We are taught, and we learn through experience, that everything and everyone is a potential hazard," Tourists are told in the handbook of their profession. It's a destiny that Weaver is desperate to escape, but that may well consume him. In the world of Olen Steinhauer's Tourists, those closest to the action are often farthest from the truth. Joshua Hammer, a former bureau chief for Newsweek, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.

*Starred Review* Since the events of The Tourist (2009), Milo Weaver has served time in prison, worked in administration, and tried to reconnect with his wife and daughter. But talk therapy is hard when you're trained to keep secrets. When asked to return to the field, he agrees, although, because of his disgust with the Department of Tourism (a black-ops branch of the CIA), he plans to feed information to his father, Yevgeny Primakov, the secret ear of the UN. But his handlers don't trust him, either, giving him a series of vetting assignments that culminates in an impossible loyalty test: the abduction and murder of a 15-year-old girl. Ironically, Weaver is then tasked with finding a security breach that threatens the very existence of Tourism and the lives of the Tourists. Seeing his own brutal compatriots as humans, he does his best to save the thing he despises, a conundrum that pretty much sums up the shades of gray that paint this modern-day espionage masterpiece. The Tourist was impressive, proving that Steinhauer had the ability to leap from the historical setting of his excellent Eastern European quintet to a vividly imagined contemporary landscape. But this is even better, a dazzling, dizzyingly complex world of clandestine warfare that is complicated further by the affairs of the heart. Steinhauer never forgets the human lives at stake, and that, perhaps, is the now-older Weaver's flaw: he is too human, too attached, to be the perfect spy. His failure to save the girl he was told to kill threads the whole book like barbed wire.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist

Proving there's still juice in the le Carr formula, still another spy comes in from the cold.There's a sort of Tourist who, when he or she visits a church or museum, wants to blow it up. In the clandestine community, Touristsnote the capitalizationare spoken of with the reverence reserved for the best and brightestand the most lethal. The Department of Tourism, established by the CIA, is so hush-hush that within the Company itself there are those who doubt its existence. Who can blame them? Who ever sees a Tourist? In the entire world, there are only 63 of this special breed, who murder in the service of their government. Essentially decent, though deeply committed, Milo Weaver was one of them. Was, then wasn't, and then suddenly, inexplicably, he's back. So there's Milo, a Milo now with wife and daughter, presumably again ready to kill on command. Soon enough, he discovers that disconcerting changes have taken place: That old gang of his is no longer at command center. But blow away a 15-year-old girl? How does one go about preparing for an assignment that far beyond the pale? Long ago, Milo trained himself to accept on faith that certain acts of wickedness were in fact patriotic acts when ordered by people who loved their country as wholeheartedly as he did. Now, however, a new pragmatism may be undermining the Tourist trade. And maybe murder will turn out to be just murder.Excessively complicated, but it's a Steinhauer (The Tourist, 2009, etc.), which means it's good all the same.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Milo Weaver, a former field agent with the CIA's clandestine Department of Tourism, returns to action after a stint in prison for alleged financial fraud in this intense sequel to The Tourist. His handlers want Weaver to pursue a mole rumored to have infiltrated the CIA's black-ops department, but with his loyalty in question, he must first undergo some test missions, one of which is to kill the 15-year-old daughter of Moldovan immigrants now living in Berlin. Such a horrific assignment further weakens Weaver's already wavering enthusiasm for his secret life, and he becomes increasingly preoccupied with reconnecting with his estranged wife and child. When bombshell revelations rock Weaver's world, he vows to somehow put international intelligence work behind him. Can he do so without jeopardizing his and his family's safety? Steinhauer's adept characterization of a morally conflicted spy makes this an emotionally powerful read. Author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This sequel to Steinhauer's memorable The Tourist presents an espionage tale as puzzling as any a spy fiction might require. An abundance of characters peppers emotionally troubled ex-superspy Milo Weaver's return to the field to perform a horrifying job he does not want to do for people he distrusts. The reader is suspended over a chasm of ambiguity as to who in which agency has been assigned by whom to do what to whom. As with all excellent spy stories, this one reveals betrayal by professional liars at every level. Tourists, hypersecret operatives of the CIA, appear to be the target of a mole, or perhaps there is no mole, only a loose lip somewhere high among American politicos. Working in Europe and the United States, anguished Milo unravels a skein of knotted plots, amoral officials, and subplots disguising an ingenious, unexpected, and terrible revenge. Verdict While not quite as focused as The Tourist-at times too many important characters and multiple plots threaten to overwhelm the reader-this is still an extraordinarily complex and compelling thriller. [Library marketing.]-Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ.-Stanislaus, Stockton, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.