Paul Christopher

In The Miernik Dossier, international agents embark on a car trip in a Cadillac, traveling from Switzerland to the Sudan. Among them are an American operative; a seven-foot-tall Muslim prince; a beautiful half-English, half-Hungarian woman; a British national; and Tadeusz Miernik, the shy and bumbling Polish scientist who might be the leader of a terror force that could set the Cold War aflame. Related as a collection of dossier notes written by the five agents, the novel reveals a complicated web in which each spins his or own deception.

To Paul Christopher, the world of espionage had become a region of the mad, in which men and women lived without conviction and were compelled by a craving for conspiracy. But now, he has to find the “mole” in the Outfit and demand justice from enemies, past and present. As he follows the twisting path of this secret American intelligence group, he discovers a trail of betrayal and violence that leads backward to the horrors of the Nazi era and plunges forward beyond the Vietnam War's labyrinth of lies.

Charles McCarry is considered by many to be the master of world-class spy fiction, garnering praise from peers and critics alike for his riveting novels. Christopher Buckley wrote that McCarry “is not only one of the best writers in America but one of the most important. He dazzles, from epigraph to epilogue,” and the Los Angeles Times hailed his work as “first rate, in the tradition of the best espionage fiction, John Buchan to Eric Ambler and John le Carré.” In this magnificent novel, Charles McCarry returns to the world of his legendary character Paul Christopher—the savvy intelligence agent as skilled at choosing a fine wine as he is at tradecraft, at once sophisticated and dangerous, and no stranger to the world of dirty tricks. Now Paul Christopher has mysteriously disappeared. Months pass and a memorial service is held for him in Washington. But a group of his retired colleagues—the “Old Boys” from the Outfit—refuse to believe Christopher is dead. Led by Christopher's cousin Horace, the Old Boys embark on a thrilling worldwide search for the master spy and an ancient scroll that may reveal an unspeakably dangerous truth.

With cinematic scope and masterful pacing, Charles McCarry delivers a haunting parable of a man confronted with the ghosts of an entire generation's brutal history. The grand tale begins in 1939 Berlin, where young Paul Christopher and his family are struggling against the rise of Nazi totalitarianism. The Christophers are known to be sympathetic to the persecuted Jews, while sixteen-year-old Paul has fallen in love with the daughter of a Jewish doctor. Their enemy is a sadistic SS officer named Stutzer, who will stop at nothing to destroy the young couple. Twenty years later, top CIA agent Paul Christopher is the only living witness to Stutzer's crimes. As he edges toward a confrontation with this mortal enemy, Christopher is forced to operate in the one theater he had thought he had mastered: his own past.