The Tourist (novel)

The Tourist is an espionage novel written by Olen Steinhauer in 2009, that was featured on The New York Times' list of best sellers.^[1] The story follows Milo Weaver, an agent with a secret branch of the CIA specializing in black ops known as the Tourists.^[2] George Clooney's production company has purchased the film rights to the novel with Clooney rumored to be playing the role of Weaver.^[2]

Reviews

As enjoyable as the books are, however, once we start looking at them closely, their flaws become all too apparent. The stories are improbably and needlessly elaborate, with the main plots surrounded by a web of subplots that come and go. Sometimes these are resolved and sometimes not, and they bring with them a large supporting cast of minor characters who also drop in and out of the story. Much of this is just complication for its own sake, and many of the characters are little more than stock figures...Casting the United States as a malign influence with a cowboy mentality is cliché, not insight, and Steinhauer makes the point with such certainty and simplicity that it sounds like something written by an undergraduate who has just learned that the world is a complex, unhappy place rather than the rational arena he had expected.

— John Ehrman: The Tourist Trilogy: The New Genre? - Studies in Intelligence Vol. 56 No. 4

References