3 results for "Literature"

The Once and Future Spy

Littell, Robert
By national best-selling author, Robert Littell, whose most recent novel The Company received rave reviews across the nation, The Once and Future Spy is finally back in print. This is Littell at the top of his form, constructing a tale of espionage and counterespionage revealing the dirty tricks and dangerous secrets about the subjects he knows intimately the CIA and American history, past and present. Littell proves beyond all doubt that he is a storyteller of inimitable caliber. As Stephen Coonts put it, “Eric Ambler invented the modern spy novel. Robert Littell perfected it. The Once and Future Spy is a classic spy story.” At the center of Littell’s plot is an elite plan, so secret and so dangerous that its existence is known only to a tiny group of specialists within CIA headquarters. There is virtually no paper trail but, somehow, the plan has sprung a leak. The plotters must urgently trace it or face deadly consequences. Meanwhile, at work elsewhere on another highly sensitive project for "the Company" is an operative known as “the Weeder” a man obsessed with American history and one of its heroes. When the Weeder's and Washington's clandestine worlds collide, the present faces the past and disturbing moral choices are weighed against a shining patriotic dream. What is the truth? Whose truth should be believed?
The Overlook Press 2003-02-10 294 pages

Walking back the cat

Littell, Robert
'Walking Back the Cat' is an unusually riveting and exotic post-Cold War thriller from a master of the espionage genre. A Soviet-era KGB agent code named Parsifal lives under deep cover in a western American town. A specialist in what the KGB describes as 'wetwork' and the rest of the world calls murder, Parsifal discovers that he has come under the orders of a new Resident - one who is preparing an operation that will shake the world. Into this cauldron of chaos comes Finn, a young veteran of the Gulf War, hoping against hope to land in a backwater where he can put the savagery he has witnessed in the desert behind him. Two incarnations of pure violence, Parsifal and Finn careen head on into each other when Finn discovers that someone is shaking down an Apache gambling casino, and Parsifal receieves instructions to kill him. 'Walking Back the Cat' plunges the reader into the mesmerizing world of KGB agents, CIA spooks and modern day Apaches desperately trying to walk the fine line between their ancestral legacy and survival in a world dominated by White Eyes run riot.
Faber 1996 218 pages

The visiting professor

Littell, Robert
"An ex-Soviet professor plays amateur detective in this post Cold War romp by New York Times bestselling spy master Robert Littell. Lemuel Falk, a theoretical "chaoticist," has been denied permission to leave Russia for the last twenty-three years, likely because he knows a few state secrets. Even he is surprised-and wary-when his twenty-fourth request is approved, and he is offered a position as visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies in upstate New York. But as soon as Professor Falk arrives in America, he is plunged into a new kind of chaos-including a high-stakes academic catfight, an affair with a much-younger hairdresser, and cascading offers from domestic spies looking to capitalize on his knowledge-and soon finds himself playing amateur detective at the behest of local police. While he helps hunt for a dangerous serial killer, he grapples with ghosts from his own past in Russia. In this wholly original novel, Littell explores chaos theory, questions of faith, ad the ironies of contemporary America"-- Provided by publisher.
Soho Crime 2026-04-21 352 pages