Set at the turn of the 1980s, the novel follows Lukash, who was suddenly transferred away from Beirut five years before, just as suddenly returning. Told he would be performing a two-month low-profile assignment, his orders are swiftly changed to a two-year assignment involving recruitment of spies from a new military faction among the Lebanese. Dangerous enough by itself, but Lukash has a secret: Before his sudden transfer, he married a Lebanese woman in defiance of standard protocols regarding security clearances and romantic entanglements. To make things more complicated, his present girlfriend is seen as a security risk, one that the CIA is quickly running out of patience over. Between the numerous identities, the women in his past and the travails of simply existing in a war-torn Beirut, the discovery of a secret plot to intensify hostilities and incite deeper U.S. involvement barely passes muster as a noteworthy event in Lukash’s life.

 

Unlike the dystopic near-future setting of his Kamas novels, Fleming sets this book – part of a trilogy – in a firmly grounded and well-documented historical setting, the Middle East of the 1980s. Bolstered by his own experiences working in the region, Fleming provides a sharp sense of place and time, letting important details work through background settings and keeping the narrative anchored in a tangible world. While some aspects of the plot work better than others – by the book’s end, Lukash’s romantic life almost seems to carry more narrative importance than his job as a CIA case officer – the various threads mesh fairly well in a believable portrait of how professional liars and secret-keepers might navigate love and war in a culture not their own. For fans of Fleming’s other novels, one of his signature touches of mysticism creeps in toward the end; a character’s dream seems to be shared among two wholly unconnected characters and come to life in a direct fashion, which seems to carry a thematic resonance for the author, although its importance to the story as a whole is unclear. Still, this brief detour does not detract from the well-machined flow of the story, which overall displays Fleming’s skill as a writer of literate, thoughtful thrillers that have something more to share than just a mastery of genre mechanics.