Single & Single

A lawyer from the London banking house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician in the English countryside is asked by his bank to explain a deposit of over five million pounds sterling in his daughter's trust. A Russian freighter is intercepted by police in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant banker, "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air. In "Single & Single," the writer who both epitomizes and transcends the spy novel genre, opens with a haunting set-piece, then establishes a sequence of events whose connections are mysterious, complex, and compelling. This is a story of corrupt liaisons between criminal elements in the new Russian states and the world of legitimate finance in Europe. Le Carre's finest novel in years, it is also an intimate story of family deceit in which a son betrays, then redeems, his corrupt father, and a husband triggers the violent demise of his wife's entire clan. Le Carre is writing at the height of his dramatic and creative powers, and Oliver Single, the central protagonist, is one of his most fascinating characters.