All The Old Knives
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3.5 • 10 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Celia used to lie for a living. Henry still does. Can they ever trust each other?
Nine years ago, Henry and Celia were lovers and colleagues, both working for the CIA station in Vienna. Until terrorists hijacked a plane at the airport, a rescue attempt, staged from the inside, went terribly wrong and everyone on board was killed.
Members of the Austrian CIA station were witness to this terrible tragedy, gathering intelligence from their sources during those tense hours, collating what could be observed from outside the plane with a series of texts coming from one of their agents on-board. So when it all went wrong, the question had to be asked: had their agent been compromised, and how?
That night has continued to haunt all of those involved; for Henry and Celia, it brought to an end their relationship. Celia decided she'd had enough; she left the agency, married and had children, and is now living an ordinary life in the Californian suburbs. Henry is still a CIA analyst, and has travelled to the US to see her one more time, to relive the past, maybe, or to put it behind him once and for all.
But neither of them can forget that question: had their agent been compromised, and how? And each of them also wonders what role their lunch companion might have played in the way things unfolded...
All the Old Knives is Olen Steinhauer's most intense, most thrilling and most unsettling novel to date - from the New York Times bestselling author deemed by many to be John le Carré's heir apparent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A quiet dinner for two in an almost-empty restaurant in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., provides the frame for this terrific standalone thriller from Steinhauer (The Cairo Affair). Henry Pelham has arrived from Europe for a meeting with his former lover and CIA colleague, Celia Favreau, now retired and a mother of two, ostensibly to wrap up the "Frankler case." That's the code name for an internal investigation into "the 2006 Vienna Airport disaster," in which a militant Muslim group took a commercial jet hostage and was apparently "aided by a source within the U.S. embassy." What is portrayed as a fact-finding evening unfolds into something much more dramatic. Henry still carries a torch for Celia, but their respective memories, and the interrelationships in the Vienna CIA office where they worked, demonstrate how the personal and the professional are so often mixed. There's great narrative energy in the thrust and counterthrust of the dinner conversation, as well as in the re-creation of the Viennese events; Steinhauer is a very fine writer and an excellent observer of human nature, shrewd about the pleasures and perils of spying. 150,000-copy first printing.
