Le Carre's ingenious mysery, featuring his most famous recurring character, George Smiley.
John le Carre was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. At sixteen he found refuge at the University of Bern, then later at Oxford. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5 & 6). He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. At the end of the Cold War, le Carre widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. He died on 12 December 2020. His posthumous novel, Silverview, was published in 2021.
Beautifully elegant, satiric and witty
*Telegraph*
This second outing in le Carre's George Smiley series finds the Cold War spy master not matching wits with the Russians but playing sleuth. When Ailsa Brimley, editor of the Christian Voice newspaper, receives a letter from a trusted contributor claiming that the woman's teacher husband is planning to murder her, Ailsa asks old friend Smiley for assistance. When the woman is killed, Smiley travels to the Carne School in the British countryside to investigate. He quickly runs into a stone wall of well-meaning police who know nothing and snobbish schoolmasters who'll say nothing, leaving him as puzzled as the listener. Narrator Michael Jayston delivers very subdued characterizations for the above-it-all Carne crew and is appropriately soft-spoken as the owlish Smiley. VERDICT As close to a cozy as le Carre gets, this title offers twists, turns, and dead ends aplenty that will keep listeners on the edge of their seats until the very last word. Mystery fans and even those expecting a spy story will be charmed. Solid all around and perfect commuter fare.-Mike Rogers, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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