
Olen Steinhauer grew up in Virginia, and has since lived in Georgia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Massachusetts, and New York. Outside the US, he's lived in Croatia (when it was called Yugoslavia), the Czech Republic and Italy. He also spent a year in Romania on a Fulbright grant, an experience that helped inspire his first five books. He now lives in Hungary with his wife and daughter. He has published stories and poetry in various literary journals over the years. His first novel, The Bridge of Sighs (2003), the start of a five-book sequence chronicling Cold War Eastern Europe, one book per decade, was nominated for five awards. The second book of the series, The Confession, garnered significant critical acclaim, and 36 Yalta Boulevard (The Vienna Assignment in the UK), made three year-end best-of lists. Liberation Movements (The Istanbul Variations in the UK), was listed for four best-of lists and was nominated for an Edgar Award for best novel of the year. The final novel in the series, Victory Square, published in 2007, was a New York Times editor's choice. With The Tourist, he has left the Cold War behind, beginning a trilogy of spy tales focused on international deception in the post 9/11 world. Happily, George Clooney's Smoke House Films has picked up the rights, with Mr. Clooney scheduled to star. http://us.macmillan.com/author/olenst...
"The Middleman is smart and entertaining and consistently intriguing..." --Scott Turow, The New York Times Book Review One of Entertainment Weekly's hottest summer thrillers With The Middleman, the perfect thriller for our tumultuous, uneasy time, Olen Steinhauer, the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including The Tourist and The Cairo Affair, delivers a compelling portrait of a nation on the edge of revolution, and the deepest motives of the men and women on the opposite sides of the divide. One day in the early summer of 2017, about four hundred people disappear from their lives. They leave behind cell phones, credit cards, jobs, houses, families--everything--all on the same day. Where have they gone? Why? The only answer, for weeks, is silence. Kevin Moore is one of them. Former military, disaffected, restless, Kevin leaves behind his retail job in San Francisco, sends a good-bye text to his mother, dumps his phone and wallet into a trash can, and disappears. The movement calls itself the Massive Brigade, and they believe change isn't coming fast enough to America. But are they a protest organization, a political movement, or a terrorist group? What do they want? The FBI isn't taking any chances. Special Agent Rachel Proulx has been following the growth of left-wing political groups in the U.S. since the fall of 2016, and is very familiar with Martin Bishop, the charismatic leader of the Massive Brigade. But she needs her colleagues to take her seriously in order to find these people before they put their plan--whatever it is--into action. What Rachel uncovers will shock the entire nation, and the aftermath of her investigation will reverberate through the FBI to the highest levels of government.
Milo Weaver used to be a "tourist" for the CIA—an undercover agent with no home, no identity—but he's since retired from the field to become a middle-level manager at the CIA's New York headquarters. He's acquired a wife, a daughter, and a brownstone in Brooklyn, and he's tried to leave his old life of secrets and lies behind. However, when the arrest of a long-sought assassin sets off an investigation into one of Milo's oldest colleagues and exposes new layers of intrigue in his old cases, he has no choice but to go back undercover and find out who's holding the strings once and for all.In The Tourist, Olen Steinhauer---twice nominated for an Edgar Award---tackles an intricate story of betrayal and manipulation, loyalty and risk in an utterly compelling novel that is both thoroughly modern and yet also reminiscent of the espionage genre's luminaries: Len Deighton, Graham Greene, and John LeCarré.
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.
Six years ago in Vienna, terrorists took over a hundred hostages, and the rescue attempt went terribly wrong. The CIA's Vienna station was witness to this tragedy, gathering intel from its sources during those tense hours, assimilating facts from the ground and from an agent on the inside. So when it all went wrong, the question had to be asked: Had their agent been compromised, and how?Two of the CIA's case officers in Vienna, Henry Pelham and Celia Harrison, were lovers at the time, and on the night of the hostage crisis Celia decided she'd had enough. She left the agency, married and had children, and is now living an ordinary life in the idyllic town of Carmel-by-the-Sea. Henry is still a case officer in Vienna, and has traveled to California to see her one more time, to relive the past, maybe, or to put it behind him once and for all.But neither of them can forget that long-ago question: Had their agent been compromised? If so, how? Each also wonders what role tonight's dinner companion might have played in the way the tragedy unfolded six years ago.All the Old Knives is New York Times bestseller Olen Steinhauer's most intimate, most cerebral, and most shocking novel to date.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Tourist... Sophie Kohl is living her worst nightmare. Minutes after she confesses to her husband, a mid-level diplomat at the American embassy in Hungary, that she had an affair while they were in Cairo, he is shot in the head and killed. Stan Bertolli, a Cairo-based CIA agent, has fielded his share of midnight calls. But his heart skips a beat when he hears the voice of the only woman he ever truly loved, calling to ask why her husband has been assassinated. Omar Halawi has worked in Egyptian intelligence for years, and he knows how to play the game. Foreign agents pass him occasional information, he returns the favor, and everyone's happy. But the murder of a diplomat in Hungary has ripples all the way to Cairo, and Omar must follow the fall-out wherever it leads. American analyst Jibril Aziz knows more about Stumbler, a covert operation rejected by the CIA, than anyone. So when it appears someone else has obtained a copy of the blueprints, Jibril alone knows the danger it represents. As these players converge in Cairo in The Cairo Affair , Olen Steinhauer's masterful manipulations slowly unveil a portrait of a marriage, a jigsaw puzzle of loyalty and betrayal, against a dangerous world of political games where allegiances are never clear and outcomes are never guaranteed.
In Olen Steinhauer's bestseller The Tourist, 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 Hammett Award--winning The Nearest Exit when the Department of Tourism was almost completely wiped out as the result of an even more insidious plot.Following on the heels of these two spectacular novels comes An American Spy, Olen Steinhauer's most stunning thriller yet. With only a handful of "tourists"—CIA-trained assassins—left, Weaver would like to move on and use this opportunity to regain a normal life, one focused on his family. But his former boss, Alan Drummond, can't let it go. When Alan uses one of Milo's compromised aliases to travel to London then disappears, it calls all kinds of attention to his actions, and Milo can't help but search for him.Worse still, it's beginning to look as if Tourism's enemies are gearing up for a final, fatal blow.
In this auspicious literary crime debut, an inexperienced homicide detective struggles amid the lawlessness of a post-WWII Eastern European city.It's August, 1948, three years after the Russians "liberated" this small nation from German Occupation. But the Red Army still patrols the capital's rubble-strewn streets, and the ideals of the Revolution are but memories. Twenty-two-year-old Detective Emil Brod, an eager young man who spent the war working on a fishing boat in Finland, finally gets his chance to serve his country, investigating murder for the People's Militia.The victim in Emil's first case is a state songwriter, but the evidence seems to point toward a political motive. He would like to investigate further, but even in his naivete, he realizes that the police academy never prepared him for this peculiar post-war environment, in which his colleagues are suspicious or silent, where lawlessness and corruption are the rules of the city, and in which he's still expected to investigate a murder. He is truly on his own in this new, dangerous world.The Bridge of Sighs launches a unique series of crime novels featuring a dynamic cast of characters in an ever-evolving landscape, the politically volatile terrain of Eastern Europe in the second half of the 20th century.The Bridge of Sighs is a 2004 Edgar Award Nominee for Best First Novel.
New York Times bestselling author Olen Steinhauer brings back Milo Weaver in The Last Tourist.In Olen Steinhauer’s bestseller An American Spy, reluctant CIA agent Milo Weaver thought he had finally put “Tourists”—CIA-trained assassins—to bed. A decade later, Milo is hiding out in Western Sahara when a young CIA analyst arrives to question him about a series of suspicious deaths and terrorist chatter linked to him. Their conversation is soon interrupted by a new breed of Tourists intent on killing them both, forcing them to run. As he tells his story, Milo is joined by colleagues and enemies from his long history in the world of intelligence, and the young analyst wonders what to believe. He wonders, too, if he’ll survive this encounter. After three standalone novels, Olen Steinhauer returns to the series that made him a New York Times bestseller.
From the author of New York Times bestseller The Tourist...Olen Steinhauer's first two novels, The Bridge of Sighs and The Confession, launched an acclaimed literary crime series set in post--World War II Eastern Europe. Now he takes his dynamic cast of characters into the shadowy political climate of the 1960s.State Security Officer Brano Sev's job is to do what his superiors ask, no matter what. Even if that means leaving his post to work the assembly line in a factory, fitting electrical wires into gauges. So when he gets a directive from his old bosses---the intimidating men above him at the Ministry of State Security, collectively known for the address of their headquarters on Yalta Boulevard, a windowless building consisting of blind offices and dark cells---he follows orders.This time he is to resume his job in State Security and travel to the village of his birth in order to interrogate a potential defector. But when a villager turns up dead shortly after he arrives, Brano is framed for the murder. Again trusting his superiors, he assumes this is part of their plan and allows it to run its course, a decision that leads him into exile in Vienna, where he finally begins to ask questions.The answers in 36 Yalta Boulevard , Olen Steinhauer's tour-de-force political thriller, teach Comrade Brano Sev that loyalty to the cause might be the biggest crime of all.
Eastern Europe, 1956: Comrade Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar, who is a proletariat writer in addition to his job as a state militia homicide detective, is a man on the brink. Estranged from his wife, whom he believes is cheating on him with one of his colleagues, and frustrated by writer's block, Ferenc's attention is focused on his job. But his job is growing increasingly political, something that makes him profoundly uncomfortable.When Ferenc is asked to look into the disappearance of a party member's wife and learns some unsavory facts about their lives, the absurdity of his position as an employee of the state is suddenly exposed. At the same time, he and his fellow militia officers are pressed into service policing a popular demonstration in the capital, one that Ferenc might rather be participating in. These two situations, coupled with an investigation into the murder of a painter that leads them to a man recently released from the camps, brings Ferenc closer to danger than ever before-from himself, from his superiors, from the capital's shadowy criminal element.The Confession is a fantastic follow-up to Olen Steinhauer's brilliant debut, The Bridge of Sighs, and it guarantees to advance this talented writer on his way to being one of the premiere thriller writers of a generation.
Olen Steinhauer's acclaimed crime series set in Eastern Europe has taken readers from the first shots of the revolution and through the chaos of the 1960s. Now, it is 1975, and one of the People's Militia investigators is bound for Istanbul when his plane is hijacked by Armenian terrorists and explodes in midair.Gavra Noukas, a secret policeman, and Katja Drdova, a homicide detective, are assigned to the case. Both believe that Brano Sev, their enigmatic superior and career secret policeman, is hiding the true motives of their investigation, but they can't figure out why until they learn that everything is connected to a seven-year-old murder with far-reaching consequences.The compelling politics and history for which Olen Steinhauer's novels have been praised turn intimate in this ambitious novel.
The revolutionary politics and chaotic history of life inside Olen Steinhauer's fictionalized Eastern European country have made his literary crime series, with its two Edgar Award nominations along with other critical acclaim, one of today's most acclaimed. Finally having reached the tumultuous 1980s, the series comes full circle as one of the earliest cases of the People's Militia reemerges to torment all of the inspectors, including Emil Brod, now the chief, who was the original detective on the case. His arrest of one of the country's revolutionary leaders in the late 1940s resulted in the politician's conviction and imprisonment, but Emil was too young in those days to understand what it meant to go up against someone so powerful--and win. Only now, in 1989, when he is days from retirement and spends more time looking over his shoulder than ahead, does he realize that what he did may get him--and others--killed.Told against the backdrop of the crumbling forty-year-old government--with the leaders who were so new in the series debut, The Bridge of Sighs--Victory Square is Steinhauer at his best. Once again he masterfully makes crime fiction both personal and political, combining a story of revenge at any cost with a portrait of a country on the brink of collapse.
In "On the Lisbon Disaster," a thrilling e-original story, New York Times bestselling espionage master Olen Steinhauer, author of The Tourist, introduces the enigmatic John Calhoun, an international security contractor who plays a prominent role in Steinhauer's novel The Cairo Affair.Before his assignment to the CIA's Cairo office, John worked in Lisbon, Portugal, where he took part in an extraordinary rendition-the apprehension of a wanted individual for interrogation. But from the beginning of the operation nothing goes as planned, and for John, it soon becomes much more than a career-defining moment; how he handles this crisis will define who he is as a person.
"You Know What's Going On" is a longish story (over 14,000 words, 47 pages in the printed edition) originally published in Agents of Treachery, an espionage-fiction anthology edited by Otto Penzler.Like my recent books (The Tourist, The Nearest Exit), "You Know What's Going On" deals with spies and spying, but with this story I wanted to move away from the European setting of most of my novels, and into Africa--specifically, Kenya and Somalia. I also wanted to deal with something I've kept at arm's length--Muslim extremism. Add to this Somali pirates, self-loathing Western agents, and a disastrous stop-over in Rome before heading on to Nairobi, and you have...well, you have the makings for some explosions.I hope you enjoy it. If you do, then of course don't resist the impulse to run out and purchase my entire back catalog, but I'd also suggest picking up a copy of Agents of Treachery--it's an excellent collection for any fan of spy fiction. For fans of the genre, I'd call it required reading.
Meet Rachel Proulx, an FBI agent with a tough mission in a thrilling short story from Olen Steinhauer, leading up to his novel, The Middleman (August 2018).Rachel has been researching underground leftwing movements on the West Coast, but she knows she won't get any real info unless she goes undercover. So she heads out to San Francisco, moving into a tiny studio, and puts her ear to the ground. But what happens when she joins a group of them for a night party in Sonoma gets her more than she bargained for - and may even get her killed.
A young man struggles to find his identity in this short story by the bestselling author of The Tourist.Olen Steinhauer's crafty story begins as an affectionate recounting by Tom, a down-on-his-luck graduate caring for his sick mother and reconnecting with his awkward friend, Jerry McLaughlin. Jerry lives in a relative's basement in Chicago, and over the intervening months the two young men strategize Jerry's seemingly innocuous plan to become a super-villain in the spirit of Bond greats like Blofeld. Things turn dark, however, when Jerry's plans find success, and he enlists the wayward Tom to help him expand his little start-up to the next level. At turns witty and diabolical, "The Start-Up" is a fiendish take on the spy genre, as well as the dangerous friendships of Highsmith, le Carré, and others."Start-Up" by Olen Steinhauer is one of 20 short stories within Mulholland Books's Strand Originals series, featuring thrilling stories by the most legendary authors in the Strand Magazine archives. View the full series list at mulhollandbooks.com and read them all!
by Olen Steinhauer
Rating: 4.0 ⭐
New York Times bestselling author of The Tourist, Olen Steinhauer, lauded as "one of the hottest names in spy fiction today," by USA Today, has consistently shown an unmatched talent for writing suspense and intrigue. Now, here together for the first time in a terrific eBook bundle are the first three works in Steinhauer's Yalta Boulevard series, which centers on the homicide department in an unnamed Eastern European capital city. The Bridge of Sighs In Olen Steinhauer's Edgar-nominated debut, young and inexperienced homicide detective Emil Brod struggles to solve the murder of a state songwriter amid the lawlessness of a politically volatile, post-WWII Eastern Europe. The Confession Moving into the 1950s, Comrade Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar, another detective in the state militia's homicide department, is asked to look into the disappearance of a party member's wife, but when he discovers that she might have run away from her abusive husband, he wishes he could do anything but return her to him. 36 Yalta Boulevard Now in the 1960s, secretive State Security Officer Brano Sev is asked to travel to his hometown for an interrogation, but when he arrives he finds himself framed for murder.
by Olen Steinhauer
Le Tourisme n'est plus... Pendant soixante ans, ce département ultraconfidentiel de la CIA a fait les beaux jours du renseignement américain. Décapité par l'espion chinois Xin Zhu, il ne compte plus guère que son chef Alan Drummond, obsédé par la vengeance, et l'agent rescapé Milo Weaver. Tentant de profiter d'une vie normale, Milo n'est pas pressé de retourner dans cet engrenage de mensonges, de meurtres et de coups tordus. Mais quand Alan Drummond disparaît, Milo est subitement rattrapé par le système.Comment protéger les siens quand l'étau se resserre?
by Olen Steinhauer
by Olen Steinhauer
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by Olen Steinhauer