And of course, there’s Milo himself, who refuses at one point to kill a 15-year-old girl he has been ordered to assassinate, opting instead to kidnap her and hide her away because his orders violated his sense of morality. Capitol building during a joint session of Congress). The corpulent intelligence agent Colonel Xin Zhu of China’s Ministry of State Security, who ruthlessly wipes out the covert agents of the Department of Tourism in The Nearest Exit’s haunting final scene (which is the equivalent, in Steinhauer’s world of espionage, to the shock ending of Tom Clancy’s pre-9/11 Debt of Honor, in which an embittered pilot flies a 747 into the U.S. The brilliant and quirky oenophile Erika Schwartz of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, who calmly tortures Milo and then later becomes an ally. He also created some memorable characters. In his Milo Weaver trilogy published between 20 – The Tourist, The Nearest Exit and An American Spy – Steinhauer took the genre to new heights, offering the intricate plotting and global hopscotching of early Frederick Forsyth and the moral nuance of vintage le Carré, but in a modern world with a more complex array of global players. Olen Steinhauer, perhaps the best contemporary writer of espionage thrillers, first introduced readers to assassin Milo Weaver and the CIA’s ultra-secretive Department of Tourism in 2009. The Last Tourist by Olen Steinhauer (Minotaur Books)
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