The Good Assassin

January 30, 2017
Cuba in the late 1950s provides the backdrop for Vidich’s simmering, old-fashioned literary spy tale, the sequel to 2016’s An Honorable Man. The CIA director persuades retired agent George Mueller to go to Cuba during the perilous last throes of the Batista regime to investigate Toby Graham, a CIA operative suspected of assisting Fidel Castro’s rebel fighters with diverted CIA weaponry. Posing as a magazine travel writer, Mueller reconnects with Jack and Liz Malone, old friends who have relocated to Cuba and are unable to see the coming upheaval in their lives, both political and personal. Toby’s betrayals aren’t limited to his mission, and Mueller must make a choice between justice and duty, between loyalty to his profession and to his friends. A novel of prerevolutionary Cuba can scarcely escape nods to Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene, but Vidich most deliberately evokes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, from the opening epigraph to the denouement. The high quality of the author’s prose makes this a worthy homage. Agent: Will Roberts, Gernert Company.

February 15, 2017
An ex-CIA agent is called into pre-Castro Cuba to discover whether a current agent has gone rogue.Disillusioned with what the agency has become, George Mueller has given up spycraft for academia, his only connection with his old job being a couple of pulp paperbacks he's written. An agency muckety-muck approaches Mueller to go to Cuba, where the dictator Batista is barely holding on to power, and, under the guise of writing a travel article, to find out whether Mueller's old colleague Toby Graham is funneling arms to Fidel Castro's rebels. The mix is pretty much what the depressive school of espionage writing has accustomed us to: friendly acquaintances who aren't really friends; former loves who are the cause of stoic regret; wealthy foreigners oblivious to the brutality that lets them enjoy their luxury; a sense of having to gauge every private and public statement because of who might be watching. And it doesn't help that the book is rather too obviously modeled on The Great Gatsby. The British can make these elements into the stuff of genuine soul-searching. American writers--the ones who write about Americans and not Europeans--tend to turn out what you might get if Don Draper had settled down with a Graham Greene novel while listening to Sinatra and feeling sorry for himself. This may be Cuba, but the spirits aren't exactly libre.

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March 1, 2017
It's 1958, and George Mueller (last seen in An Honorable Man, 2016) has left the CIA to teach literature. But CIA director Allen Dulles asks him to take on a special assignment: go to Cuba and check out agent Toby Graham, a friend of Mueller's at Yale and a former CIA colleague in post-WWII Vienna. Dulles fears that Graham might be supporting Castro's revolt against Cuba's corrupt and brutal dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Vidich spins a tale of moral and psychological complexity, recalling Graham Greene. His portrait of often-boisterous Havana, with Mob-controlled casinos filled with nervous U.S. revelers, is tilted early on by a bomb blast just outside La Floridita, Hemingway's favorite bar, that stuns Mueller. Most everyone knows that Batista will be toppled, but his secret police and random bombings menace everyone, and Vidich builds on the tension that afflicts the entire country. Toby is a fascinating cipher, even for the insightful Mueller, who can't ignore the affection and respect he holds for his friend. But Mueller's thinking is complicated by Toby's love for the long-suffering wife of another Yale classmate. Vidich offers a rich, rewarding stew of uncertainty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)