SERIES REVIEW - Milo Weaver by Olen Steinhauer

In this thrilling series by New York Times best-selling author, Olen Steinhauer, Milo Weaver is called The Tourist, a job he had in the CIA. His exploits are explored in each book.

Title:   The Tourist

Publisher:  Minotaur Books

Format:  Kindle ARC
No. of Pages:   408

Date of Publication:  March 3, 2009 
My Rating:  4 Stars

DESCRIPTION:

Milo Weaver has tried to leave his old life of secrets and lies behind by giving up his job as a “tourist” for the CIA—an undercover agent with no home, no identity.

Now he’s working a desk at the agency’s New York headquarters. But when the arrest of a long-sought-after assassin sets off an investigation into a colleague, exposing new layers of intrigue in his old cases, he has no choice but to go back undercover and find out who’s been behind it all from the very beginning.

Link to purchase the book

MY THOUGHTS:

Milo Weaver wanted out of the CIA. Some of the jobs he had to do really got to him. He simply got tired of living a life full of lies. But, he gets drawn back in after the death of assassin leading Milo to begin an investigation of a colleague.

Milo thought he dealt with secrets and lies before. Now, however, he finds that he must dig into some very old cases. This means that he must go undercover yet again. There goes his identity.

Reading a novel about the CIA is something new to me. I chose to grab this series from NetGalley and was able to read all three books, and look forward to the last book in the series coming up nexgt year, The Last Tourist.

The characters, plot and scenarios are truly complicated. Thankfully for me, I had the next two books in the series and read them in order. This helped me to find a place in Milo's world. Also, I was able to imagine myself in an action movie while reading the book. This helped to make the rather unbelievable drama and danger seem not so unlikely.

The Tourist proved to be an excellent spy thriller, and now I have yet another genre to seek out.

Many thanks to Minotaur Books and to NetGalley for this ARC for review.  This is my honest opinion.

Title:   The Nearest Exit

Publisher:  Minotaur Books

Format:  Kindle ARC
No. of Pages:   404

Date of Publication:  May 11, 2010
My Rating:  4 Stars

DESCRIPTION:

Milo Weaver has nowhere to turn but back to the CIA in Olen Steinhauer’s brilliant follow-up to the New York Times bestselling espionage novel The Tourist.

The Tourist, Steinhauer’s first contemporary novel after his award winning historical series, was a runaway hit, spending three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and garnering rave reviews from critics.

Now faced with the end of his quiet, settled life, reluctant spy Milo Weaver has no choice but to turn back to his old job as a “tourist.” Before he can get back to the CIA’s dirty work, he has to prove his loyalty to his new bosses, who know little of Milo’s background and less about who is really pulling the strings in the government above the Department of Tourism—or in the outside world, which is beginning to believe the legend of its existence. Milo is suddenly in a dangerous position, between right and wrong, between powerful self-interested men, between patriots and traitors—especially as a man who has nothing left to lose.

Link to purchase the book

MY THOUGHTS:

In the first book of the series, The Tourist, Milo Weaver was drawn back into the lies and secrets that are sometimes the fiber of the CIA in order to investigate one of his own colleagues. He had to go deep, very deep.

Now, Milo has new bosses, and must prove his loyalty. His prior life is yet unknown to them, but he still has rather high reaches in the Department of Tourism, a secret part of the CIA.

In this story, we have a secondary character, Xin Zhu. Milo does whatever he can, and believe me, he does quite a lot, to bring Zhu down. It is busy, graphic, violent and intriguing. Yeah, hard to believe so much could happen in a relatively short period of time, but, after all, it is a spy thriller. Think of a Hollywood blockbuster or two of the same ilk, and you will find yourself enjoying this novel and turning pages faster than you could imagine.

If I hadn't had the third book, An American Spy, already downloaded on my Kindle, I would have thought Milo came to an end in this book.

Many thanks to Minotaur Books and to NetGalley for this ARC for review.  This is my honest opinion.

Title:   An American Spy

Publisher:  Minotaur Books

Format:  Kindle ARC
No. of Pages:   386

Date of Publication:  March 13, 2012
My Rating:  4 Stars

DESCRIPTION:

Reluctant CIA agent Milo Weaver uncovered a conspiracy linking the Chinese government to the highest reaches of the American intelligence community, including his own Department of Tourism---the most clandestine department in the Company. The shocking blowback arrived in The Nearest Exit when the Department of Tourism was almost completely wiped out as the result of an even more insidious plot.

With only a handful of "tourists"--CIA-trained assassins--left, Weaver would like to move on and use this as an opportunity to regain a normal life, a life focused on his family. His former boss in the CIA, Alan Drummond, can't let it go. When Alan uses one of Milo's compromised aliases to travel to London and then disappears, calling all kinds of attention to his actions, Milo can't help but go in search of him.

Worse still, it's beginning to look as if Tourism's enemies are gearing up for a final, fatal blow.

Link to purchase the book

MY THOUGHTS:

If I didn't have this book on the reader after finishing the second book in the series, The Nearest Exit, just before starting this, I would have thought our intrepid spy Milo Weaver had met an untimely end. Obviously that was not the case, because this thrilling and exciting story by Olen Steinhauer has continued with this very book, An American Spy.

During the course of this series, I have seen Milo rise, fall and rise again, only to fall yet again. A former CIA agent, Milo is now employed with the ultra secret the Department of Tourism. Milo is not your typical hero. He is flawed, can be self-destructive and self-centered. But, he does appreciate justice and works feverishly hard at catching the bad guys. And that is what it is all about in this series.

He is a man well-traveled, often emotionally damaged, with fractured relationships, and has the ability to lose his scruples if things reach a certain point. Milo is called The Tourist, and he is not the only one. They are an elite team and pretty much have their own value system.

The story never stopped when it came to action. I powered through it and really enjoyed reading something so exciting, although this is a rather new turn for me. I am looking forward to the next (maybe last?) book in the series, The Last Tourist, coming in 2020.

Many thanks to Minotaur Books and to NetGalley for this ARC for review.  This is my honest opinion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Olen Steinhauer grew up in Virginia, and has lived throughout the US and Europe. He spent a year in Romania on a Fulbright grant, an experience that helped inspire his first five books. He now splits his time between Hungary and New York with his wife and daughter.

His first novel, The Bridge of Sighs (2003), began a five-book sequence chronicling Cold War Eastern Europe, one book per decade. It was nominated for five awards. The rest of the sequence includes: The Confession, 36 Yalta Boulevard (The Vienna Assignment in the UK), Liberation Movements (The Istanbul Variations in the UK)—this one was nominated for an Edgar Award for best novel of the year—and Victory Square, which was a New York Times editor’s choice.

With The Tourist (2009), he began a trilogy of spy tales focused on international deception in the post 9/11 world. The Tourist reached the New York Times bestseller list, and has been translated into 25 languages. The second volume, The Nearest Exit, was published in 2010 and won the Hammett Prize for best literary crime novel of the year. The finale, An American Spy, was published in March 2012 in the US and UK, and it spent 3 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, as well as the LA Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists.

The Cairo Affair (2014), which begins in Budapest and moves to post-Mubarak Cairo and Libya in the midst of the Arab Spring, was published to acclaim from The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Amazon.com, The Saturday Evening Post, The Christian Science Monitor, PopSugar, and others. It reached a number of bestseller lists, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly.

All the Old Knives (2015), deals with terrorism, love and revenge, split between a restaurant in California and the American embassy in Vienna. He penned the screenplay, which is being produced by Chockstone Pictures and Nick Wechsler Productions, and will star Chris Pine. He spent nearly a year in Berlin making a television show, Berlin Station, which ran for three seasons on Epix.

Turning to the threat of domestic terrorism, The Middleman (2018) focuses on the political anxieties and frustrations of contemporary America.

Forthcoming in March 2020, The Last Tourist will return to the world of Milo Weaver, jumping a decade past the events in An American Spy and bringing Milo’s story fully into the present.

web | twitter | facebook