Walking Back the Cat

The New York Times has called Robert Littell "the American Le Carre," and his terrific new thriller shows why. A KGB contract killer nicknamed Parsifal, living in New Mexico as a dealer in rare guns, is suddenly called back into action by his old controller and ordered to remove a Russian defector and several leaders of the Apache tribe who run a gambling casino. Parsifal links up with a burned-out Gulf War vet named Finn to find out why--after years of inactivity--the KGB has turned itself back into an oddly motivated killing machine. The results are well up to Littell's high standards of intelligence and excitement.