Legends

Starred review from May 23, 2005
As in The Company
(2002), a long and serious chronicle of the CIA, Littell provides plenty of inside intelligence info in his superb new thriller, but he adds a decidedly comic spin. A female CIA executive looks frighteningly like Fred Astaire, while a former top agent works as a PI out of a former pool parlor above a nondescript Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn. The detective's name seems to be Martin Odum, but "Fred Astaire" calls him Dante, and he also goes by Lincoln Dittmann, the name of a Civil War enthusiast whose cartons of memorabilia sit unopened in Martin's office. Is Martin Odum himself a "legend"—a fake identity dreamed up in the dark imagination of the CIA? Because he needs the work, Martin agrees to help an old Russian KGB agent find his Israeli daughter's husband and persuade the man to give her a "get"—a divorce decree required by religious law. The husband has been pretending he's Jewish to cover up his link to a Russian criminal called the Oligarkh. As the bodies of his friends and clients begin to pile up, Odum searches for answers about not only the missing husband but also himself. Wonderful writing and a great sense of fun make this another winner. Agent, Ed Victor
. 150,000 first printing; 6-city author tour
.

August 1, 2005
Littell's witty and suspenseful tale reads like a conglomeration of John le Carré's cynical spy vs. spy elements and Ross Thomas's whimsical and darkly humorous insider's view of international politics. It takes an agile narrator to adjust to the rapidly changing moods. Making the job even more daunting is a protagonist suffering from multiple personality disorder who can shift from wry, laid-back ex–secret agent–turned–private detective Martin Odum to ebullient Irish dynamiter Dante Pippin almost within the same sentence. Gardner, with nearly 500 audiobooks to his credit, handles the job smoothly and effortlessly. He also provides a polyglot panoply of credible accents, including Russian, Irish, Israeli, Palestinian and Asian. The complex and multilayered plot finds Odum hired to locate the husband of an Israeli woman to persuade him to agree to a divorce. He soon discovers that the globe-hopping search is taking him to people and places from his own perilous days in the spy game. This is particularly true when he slips back into past "legends," personas concocted for him by his CIA superiors. In dealing with the novel's character changes, flashbacks, misdirection and surprising revelations, clarity seems to be Gardner's main goal and he achieves it admirably, all the way to the satisfying finale. Simultaneous release with the Overlook hardcover (Reviews, May 23).

May 1, 2005
Get this: rumpled Brooklyn PI Martin Odum is not sure who he really is, having lived so long and so convincingly under the assumed identities--legends--in his work for the CIA. Hired to find the missing Samat so that his abandoned Israeli wife can get a proper divorce, Odum tracks his man across the continents, stumbling over a plethora of shady dealings that make Eric Ambler's Dimitrios seem small-time: plastic explosives, opium, bioweapons, suspicious quantities of fertilizer, the relics of a Lithuanian saint. All of which may or may not connect to the past exploits of Martin's other selves: the brash Irish dynamiter Dante Pippen, who infiltrates Hizbullah, and the disaffected Civil War buff Lincoln Dittman, who penetrates al-Qaeda. Littell's sardonic style is reminiscent of the wry slouch-and-dagger intrigue of the late, great Ross Thomas, enthusiastically embellished with spy lore and geopolitical anecdote. No respecter of the classical unities, Littell imbues his tale with the same split personality of its protagonist, veering from jocose banter to grim torture, but for readers prepared to follow his lead, he delivers a smart, fun, strange adventure in the legendary tradition of Odysseus, yet another wily trickster who boasts to his peril that he is "no man."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)