paula yates

It was a pleasure to watch events unfold and Olen Steinhauer's skills evolve over the five-novel series he set in an unnamed Soviet bloc nation -- from the police procedural "The Bridge of Sighs" (2003), in which the idealistic cops of the First District Militia Station are introduced, through the adventures of the enigmatic state security officer Brano Sev, to "Victory Square" (2007), which reunites the older yet wiser colleagues in a masterful mix of police procedural and espionage novel that illuminates the human dimension of a crucial historical period without sacrificing a crackling good plot.

Although reading the last installment was a bittersweet affair, reports that Steinhauer had something else up his sleeve -- a contemporary international thriller that had attracted the attention of George Clooney and Warner Bros. -- surfaced almost immediately and, given Clooney's nuanced portrayals of hard-bitten heroes in "Syriana" and other thrillers, raised hopes for what "The Tourist" might offer as grist for the literary and cinematic mills.

The Tourist's" hero stands in marked contrast to any of Steinhauer's previous characters, or what has come before in the novels of masters like John le Carré or Len Deighton. It's Sept. 10, 2001, and Charles Alexander is on a plane bound for Slovenia. Hours before, he had thwarted an attempt on the life of a U.S.-supported Dutch politician by an assassin known only as "the Tiger.

His reward is a new assignment, one that requires him to team up with CIA colleague Angela Yates to capture Frank Dawdle, a veteran CIA agent who has stolen $3 million meant to buy information on a Bosnian-Serb war criminal. Charles is burned out -- stomach cramping on receiving his new assignment, popping Dexedrine like breath mints as he acknowledges "he'd slipped to some secluded corner of the extremes, some far reach of utter imbalance." So tenuous is his mental state that he had considered standing up and facing the still-shooting assassin in Amsterdam, saved only by a cellphone call from boss Tom Grainger that directs him to Slovenia.