THE COLOR OF NIGHT

An engrossing thriller about autumnal Cold Warriors. Harry Strand, erstwhile super spy, has been in from the cold for five solid years. The art dealer’s world, once his cover, is now his reality. Though still in a kind of half mourning for his wife—killed 11 months earlier in an automobile collision—he is reasonably content, at least as content as melancholy Harry ever expects to be. His routines, his business, and his select company of friends solace and comfort him so that, in all, it’s a manageable life. But enter Mara Song, a gorgeous Chinese- American divorcÇe with a collection of valuable drawings she wants him to sell for her. Before he knows it, Harry is head over heels. But just who is this remarkably attractive person? Is she at all who she purports to be? The question intensifies when Harry finds a certain shocking videocassette in her room detailing an auto smash-up, the very one that cost him his wife. And, clearly, what Harry had always supposed was an accident was anything but. Harry, though, convinces himself that Mara is true-blue and the cassette a plant. And almost instantly, he realizes who must have planted it. The implications are disruptive and scary: a deadly secret, which he—d long felt was safely buried, has been disinterred by a powerful enemy who’s no longer a sleeping dog. Once duped by Harry, he now seeks retribution—on Harry and on the group of intelligence agents Harry once ran. What it comes down to, Harry grimly decides as one former ally after another is isolated and brutally dealt with, is kill or be killed. Lindsey (Requiem For a Glass Heart, 1996, etc.) is in that army of thriller writers who are regularly measured against le CarrÇ. And he’s one of the few who consistently bears up.