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In the past, Steinhauer’s best trick has been balancing the spy stuff with more mundane, but relatable, family drama and that continues here. His job as head of the Library has been going relatively smoothly and kept him and his family out of the line of fire, getting back to some level of normalcy after the rollercoaster that the first three books put the characters through. A fresh point of view turns out to be a good way to reintroduce some of the characters we haven’t seen in years, as well as offer another character besides Milo whose story we’re invested in.Īfter a surprising cameo appearance in his previous book, The Middleman, in his latest we get a fuller picture of what Milo has been up to over the past few years. Ghalili is a fish out of water, quickly out of his element and left at the mercy of people far above him. The Last Tourist begins from the point of view of a CIA analyst, Abdul Ghalili, sent far away from his desk to Laayoune, Western Sahara to debrief Milo after he’s reached out to the CIA. Despite the rather loopy description above when you read the novels Steinhauer manages to keep the concept grounded in reality, mostly succeeding in making the wild leaps feel natural. Weaver ended up taking over for his father as the head of yet another secret spy agency, this one called “the library” and run out of the UN by Milo’s father, a former Russian spy. At the end of An American Spy, the department had been decimated by its rivals in the Chinese government and put in mothballs.
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Members of the department, called “tourists” would fan out around the world killing those who got in the way of the good ol’ US of A.
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Milo was a member of a secretive CIA department called Tourism, it’s agents tasked with cleaning up messes that the government didn’t want to have to acknowledge. It’s been 8 years since we’ve had a novel dedicated to the trials and tribulations of Milo Weaver, Olen Steinhauer’s former spy turned spymaster.