A perfectly serviceable spy thriller, although I had a hard time keeping up with the names. Probably would be better read in a shorter time.

DNF. I'm sorry. I tried. After reading 25% I couldn't care less about Milo Weaver or whatever he was supposed to be doing. Olen Steinhauser's book gets good reviews but I was so bored and could not get into it at all. Overall, a bland look into the CIA's Tourists, which do...stuff.

Milo Weaver wanted out of the CIA. Some of the jobs he had to do really got to him. He simply got tired of living a life full of lies. But, he gets drawn back in after the death of assassin leading Milo to begin an investigation of a colleague.

Milo thought he dealt with secrets and lies before. Now, however, he finds that he must dig into some very old cases. This means that he must go undercover yet again. There goes his identity.

Reading a novel about the CIA is something new to me. I chose to grab this series from NetGalley and was able to read all three books, and look forward to the last book in the series coming up next year, The Last Tourist.

The characters, plot and scenarios are truly complicated. Thankfully for me, I had the next two books in the series and read them in order. This helped me to find a place in Milo's world. Also, I was able to imagine myself in an action movie while reading the book. This helped to make the rather unbelievable drama and danger seem not so unlikely.

The Tourist proved to be an excellent spy thriller, and now I have yet another genre to seek out.

Many thanks to Minotaur Books and to NetGalley for this ARC for review. This is my honest opinion.

Excellent book about being a spy - a secret spy (u.s. calls them tourists). Who can you trust? How do you have a family with all of these secrets? Keeps you guessing until the end. Excellent!

Good start, weak middle and finish, all rushing about and reporting secret histories. What resonates a little, though, today, is the complexity and unknowability of the new world disorder.

Given how lauded this book was when it debuted in 2009, I had high hopes for this one, but I felt very "meh" about the whole experience. Perhaps I've seen too many spy movies, but I really wasn't very impressed. My heart did not race even once while reading, I was not worried about the life of the protagonist (it never hung in the balance), and I didn't really care about the outcome either way.

That said, I think this was part of the originality of this novel: the reality of it. The protagonist is a mostly retired spy, so he's not going to have a bag of tricks up his sleeve to be thwarting those in pursuit left and right - he's out of practice. And he has something to lose, rather than nothing (he has a family, so he wants to be careful about how he handles situations). Plus, in real life, I'm sure there aren't gunfights on every corner, and men throwing themselves off of bridges (I'm thinking of the Bourne films, otherwise known as The Holy Grail because I love them so). So, in that respect, I found this novel quiet refreshing in its banality. Will I read another novel by Steinhauer? Probably not.

The beginning of the book consists of what seem like unrelated incidents and I was wondering what this was all about, but later on it picks up and things tie up together and become interesting.
A few things that bothered me-
The “travel agency” did not check the story of his parents, and the foster care system????? Really? Because the whole book, the trilogy, is based on where Milo was for his teens.
And Tina???

My rating of this book may be coloured by the fact that I read this out of order so I knew some of the secrets already. Secrets are important when reading spy thrillers. So definitely, read this before The Nearest Exit and An American Spy.

A classic thriller in the style of Robert Ludlum (albeit plotted slightly more carefully), somewhat updated for 21st century intelligence budget cutbacks, competing US agencies, and cell phones.

The first act is a fun run and gun, the second drags a bit as the mythos grows and everyone's on the lam, and the third picks up as a political thriller.

Spoiler

I appreciated Steinhauer not stooping to threatening the family. I could have done without the asides of three 13-year olds being raped and wasn't as impressed with all of the female agents being gay or "folding their arms under their breasts" as the characters in the book were.