Walking Back the Cat

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Very Good condition. Good dust jacket. A copy that may have a few cosmetic defects. May also contain light spine creasing or a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers V14B-04504

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Rezensionen: In the delightful, surprising Cat, which is of a piece with Littell's other fine thrillers (e.g., The Defection of A.J. Lewinter), "Parsifal," a Soviet mole, discovers that he no longer carries out his "wet work" (contract killing) for the KGB but for an unknown party who is using a New Mexico casino run by "all that's left on earth of the Suma Apaches, the smallest Indian tribe in America, living on the smallest Indian reservation in America" to launder money. Parsifal joins forces with his final intended victim, a Gulf War dropout named Finn. Together they "walk back the cat," retracing the chain of command between Parsifal and the hidden executive who ordered Finn's execution. The wholly unexpected finale involves Parsifal and Finn, a bunch of rogue CIA agents, some very determined Apaches, and a hot-air balloon. Very funny and very good.?David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In spy lingo, "walking back the cat" means tracing a double cross backward to its source. In espionage master Littell's latest, two strange bedfellows--a killer and his intended victim--attempt a little cat-walking. A recently reactivated KGB assassin, code-named Parsifal, and a disillusioned Gulf War vet, Finn, set out to learn who's behind the contract on Finn and thus determine who betrayed Parsifal's network. The cat's trail leads first to an Apache casino near Santa Fe and eventually to some renegade CIA honchos who refuse to let the cold war die and, in an ingenious bit of sleight-of-hand, have enlisted what's left of the KGB to heat it up. Littell's twisting story line is an architectural marvel, and his ability to generate empathy for two violent men with buckets of blood on their hands is equally impressive. Walk back this novel's cat, and you'll find a fine mix of Tony Hillerman atmosphere, le Carrepsychology, and Ross Thomas plotting. Bill Ott

An aging KGB agent and a seen-it-all Gulf War vet join forces to thwart a ring of freelance assassins in this quirky Cold War thriller. Finn, a balloonist on the fly from the consequences of a bar brawl in Seattle, sets down on the tiny Suma Apache reservation in New Mexico to find that the locals' casino has been paying serious protection money to the Mafia. Finn also finds himself falling in love with the elderly headman's young wife, Shenandoah. While he's trying to overcome her resistance, he resolves to do what he can to help her people--and that means getting their Sicilian partners off their backs. But the shakedown artists aren't the Mafia after all, as Finn learns when his appointment to brief an FBI agent on the deaths of earlier Suma complainants almost leads to his getting killed himself. Instead, as Finn works it out with the help of Parsifal, the false defector who's actually a KGB agent sent to assassinate him, Parsifal himself has executed them all at the behest of the higher-ups who reactivated him four years after glasnost buried his deep-cover placement even deeper. But why does the KGB want to milk a lowly Apache casino and kill those who make a stink about the profit-sharing? The beautifully simple answer is that they don't: Sometime between the fall of the USSR and the raising of the casino, rogue operatives tapped into Parsifal's chain of command, and they're now running him as a wetwork specialist who thinks his jobs are being authorized by Mother Russia. So instead of killing Finn, Parsifal uses his help to puzzle out what went wrong, and at whose instance. Even though the answers aren't as elegant or original as the questions, Littell (The Visiting Professor, 1994, etc.) delivers the goods with understated ingenuity and his hallmark tenderness- -a commodity even rarer in spy fiction than merited trust. (First printing of 50,000; $40,000 ad/promo) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.