The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer


The Tourist (Paperback)

$14.99
ISBN-13: 9780312374877
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Minotaur Books, 2/2010

Milo Weaver is a Tourist for the Company, a clandestine US intelligence agency within the CIA. Always undercover, and always traveling the world blindly following orders: whether delivering classified document’s, cleaning up someone else’s mistakes, or eliminating an opponent. The Tourist starts out with Milo Weaver, a burned out shell of a person still working as a Tourist, chasing after an agent gone bad that ends with life changing results. Now fast forward six years to where Milo Weaver is a desk man at the Tourist Board, and happily a family man with a semi-regular yet still secretive job. All that happy routine goes out the door when a long-sought-after assassin is caught and has some information for Milo that sends him reluctantly back into Tourism.

One of the things I really liked about this book is that it starts out with the main character's life in the midst of crashing and burning, he is physically and emotionally at very bottom, and from there the story moves back and forth in time, mixing the past with the present. At several points in this thriller I really had no clue where the story was going to go, which for a mystery thriller is really cool. This book has an intricate plot and Olen Steinhauer main character, Milo, leads you through the many layers, but ultimately what it comes down to is the search for truth. This is a thoroughly modern day spy thriller that I loved and found hard to put down. ~Mara