The Tourist

A Novel

By: Olen Steinhauer

Narrated by: Tom Weiner

Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

In the vein of John le Carré and Graham Greene, this contemporary international thriller follows Milo Weaver as he is drawn into a conspiracy that links riots in the Sudan, an assassin committing suicide, and an old friend who's been accused of selling secrets to the Chinese. Once the CIA and Homeland Security are after him, the only way for him to survive is to return, headfirst, into Tourism.

©2009 Olen Steinhauer (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"[Weaver] is the perfect hero for such a richly nuanced tale." ( Booklist)
"Superbly accomplished at both plotting and characterization....highly recommended." ( Library Journal)

Intriguing with the Twists of a great spy novel

Love the characters. The story with all the twists and turns kept this reader's attention through the end.

yawn

Giving up after 15 chapters of what feels like character development and story staging.

The narration is dry.

Unnecessarily complicated

A good read, but overly complicated for an audiobook. Too many characters to follow, not sure of their true significance to the outcome of the tale.

Excellent Spy Plot

I really enjoyed the novel because it was more cerebral than most other novels of the genera. I’ll listen to all his novels now. I’m so happy that I found the author.

Spy thriller

Exciting and has lots of twists and turns! Very well done! Excellent narrator.. Looking forward to the next volume.

Snoozer...zzz

I fell a sleep several times trying to get thru this book...

Had to keep replaying the parts where I dozed off.

It just never got better.

Disappointing

Introducing information in bit and pieces and expansion of previously introduced events is a nice touch; on I haven't experienced to this extent before. I liked it.
The ending left me cold. It was clearly intended to set up a follow-on book and diminished the story. This is the trap Patricia Cornwell fell into with her Scarpeta series. I don't listen to her books any longer and won't select the follow-on to this book either.

Melancholy, in a minor key

There's a sadness that permeates the story, it pulled me along, wanting resolution. Great narration, esp. Milo, Yevgeny and other low baritones, but ugh, Tina... learn a better class of Texan, or perhaps just narrate the female lines. That's advice for some female narrators reading male roles too.

All that aside, I'll read the next in the series, see if Milo can find and hold a spark of joy, learn from Dad.

Strange

This was a different spy novel from many of the others that now dominate the space. Good different. It didn’t have the male macho, testosterone, fight-a-minute, invincible main character ring about it. It’s is subtle and and nuanced. The plot is fairly complex and many spy novel tropes are avoided (but some of the reliable ones are still there - the genre favorite is present: the spy who came in from the cold).

However, this was a strange novel. The author made some choices with the main character that defy understanding and, frankly, the author simply didn’t bother to justify or explain those choices. I won’t say much as I don’t want to spoil the plot for you, however, after a while I lost track of the protagonist’s motivations and, by the end, frankly I was completely out of touch with the main character. There were quite a few anticlimactic story lines and I was left hanging I think with the major story line in the novel. I kept thinking that I must have missed an important scene or skipped over a whole chapter by mistake - but, no, I hadn’t as I went back and checked and that’s actually what the author intended. I’m not saying you won’t like the plot and character development choices made by the author, I’m just saying that I found them strange.

Finally, there were so many auxiliary characters (some with multiple aliases) in the novel, it took some effort to keep track of all of them. By the end of the story, to be honest, I had forgotten who did what to whom earlier in the novel. Many of the characters eventually had no role in the novel except as red herrings and this angered me a little - quite a bit of work is done in the novel to build up a particular story line, but then the story is jack knifed into another direction rather suddenly in the last third.

Anyway, despite all I’ve said, it’s not a bad novel and you should consider giving it a listen.

However,

Very good Listen

This is a well written book. the characters are nicely developed and the plot was good. If you like espionage get this book.