Absolute Friends (2005) - John Le Carre

Starving for a Tom Clancy techno or a Neal Stephenson cyber, I'd check Borders weekly or Amazon.com almost nightly for whatever might come close. In the hits and misses that followed, I'm glad to have re-discovered John Le Carre, once master spy storyteller, now master ex-spy thrill-er.

Absolute Friends stalks the lives of a handler and his spy, from dissident times in 1960's Western Europe to the present day re-invention of terrorist militancy worldwide. The sudden re-appearance of British spyhandler Ted Mundy's past in the form of his ever-faithful friend and spy, Sasha, rehashes memories of Cold War espionage followed by the slow drift between his non-commital, directionless self and the highly-determined Sasha with his conviction to revolutionary change in the world stage. In this, his friend's resurrection, comes perhaps Mundy's final gasp at a meaningful existence, only to gather himself short of Sasha's questionable motives, but then ultimately get derailed by an unexpected turn of events.

Unexpected both to Mundy and the reader, in a classic story-telling misdirection compliments of Le Carre.