Single & Single

From New York Times bestselling author John le Carré comes a gripping post–Cold War espionage thriller about Russian organized crime, international finance, money laundering, and the dangerous collision between East and West.

A lawyer from a London finance house is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician in the English countryside is asked to explain the arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust.

In Single & Single, le Carré masterfully establishes a sequence of events whose connections are mysterious, complex, and compelling. He tells of corrupt liaisons between organized crime in the new Russian states and the world of legitimate finance in the West. He also paints an intimate portrait of two families: one Russian, the other English; one trading illicit goods, the other laundering money; one betrayed by a son-in-law, the other betrayed—and redeemed—by a son.

“Any reader who feared that the end of the Cold War would deprive Mr. le Carré of his subject can now feel a measure of relief.” —The New York Times