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by: Charles McCarry
List Price: $24.95Amazon.com's Price: $16.47 You Save: $8.48 (34%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781585678549
ISBN: 1585678546
Label: Overlook Hardcover
Manufacturer: Overlook Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: November 23, 2006
Publisher: Overlook Hardcover
Sales Rank: 128895
Studio: Overlook Hardcover
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
A nervous courier delivers the handwritten manuscript of a dissident Russian novel to Paul Christopher early one morning in West Berlin. Minutes after the handoff, the courier’s spine is neatly snapped by an impact with a passing black sedan. Meanwhile in Rome, Christopher’s wife Cathy takes a famous film director as a lover to stir her husband out of the stoicism that defines his personality.
These two seemingly discrete events set in motion a spiral of operational and personal intrigue that leads Christopher from meetings with an aging agent in the cafes of old Europe to a rendezvous with an operative on the front lines of the Cold War in the Congo as he secretly arranges the publication of a novel that could bring the Soviet system to its knees and races to identify the leak that compromised the messenger—and possibly his entire mission.
Since his reemergence with the publication of Old Boys, Charles McCarry has been once again heralded as one of the select few espionage novelists who manages to break out of his genre to shine as a brilliant novelist in his own right. The Secret Lovers is McCarry at his best—an exploration of the epic scope of 'the great game,' but also a riveting psychological portrait of a man ensnared by a profession that never failed to exert its insidious influence outside the professional boundaries that, like the facade of diplomacy that outwardly held the Cold War in check, could never contain its violence essence.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Elegant story telling
I've now read book three (The Secret Lovers) in the seven-part Paul Christopher series, and I think it is the best so far -- a good mystery as much as it was a good spy novel. I disagree with those who say this book is tedious. It needs virtually no action because the cat-and-mouse descriptions of the various players chasing each other around through their various feints just keeps teasing your curiosity about who done it. The story of Carolos in the latter pages was fabulous. Solid 4 stars.
Rating: - A complex adventure
Plotted with intricacy, this spy story has interesting and attractive characters, convincing detail, and tone in its characters' speeches that takes the reader to the time and locale.
Rating:  - Throw Cathy from the train
As much as I enjoyed Old Boys and Ghosts, I just couldn't get past the dreadful Cathy. Paul Christopher's first love age 16 (Rima)had character, brains and nerve. Christopher's choice of Cathy, a neurotic, rather stupid, slutty mess, simply doesn't ring true.
Rating:  - 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 ... Read More
Rating: - 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 ... Read More
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