A Most Wanted Man

By Clayton Moore, Special to the Rocky

Published October 16, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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* Fiction. By John Le Carre. Scribner, $28. Grade: B+

Plot in a nutshell: The writer who cast the mold for contemporary spy novels with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold revisits the perilous trade with this elegant, intricate tale of rival agencies warring over a fugitive immigrant.

After engaging the Southern Hemisphere in recent novels, Le Carre returns to modern-day Europe in this work, only to find an even more outlandish game with rules much altered since Sept. 11. The target of the book's convergent spycraft calls himself Issa Salim Mahmoud, claiming to be a Muslim Chechen escaped to Hamburg after nearly 1,000 days in Turkish and Russian prisons. Fractured from his torturous captivity, his sole possession is the code to an account at Brue Freres, a closely held institution led by its heir, Tommy Brue. The banker wants little to do with this mysterious account - code named Lipizzaner, after horses born black that turn white as they mature - originated by his indiscreet father, Edward Amadeus Brue.

Tommy and Issa's attorney, Annabel Richter, struggle to do the right thing by the damaged young man, but their charge isn't made any easier by the spooks circling around them. Among those eager to get their claws into Issa are Gunther Bachmann, a ruthless German intelligence officer, as well as a pair of ham-handed British spies and some good old boys from the CIA. Soon Annabel is co-opted by the Germans while Brue is blackmailed by the British, all in the name of turning Issa into an instrument to ambush a Muslim cleric believed to be funding continental terrorism.

Sample of prose: Annabel's ethical quandary: "In law school, we talked a great deal about law over life. It's a verity of our German history: law not to protect life but to abuse it. We did it to the Jews. In its current American form it licenses torture and state kidnapping. And it's infectious. Your own country is not immune, neither is mine. I am not the servant of that kind of law, Mr. Brue."

Pros: Few writers lend such human nuance to the ugly business of intelligence like Le Carre; his indictment of "rendition" is equally thoughtful.

Cons: It's hard to garner compassion for the outlandish young man on whom the story pivots, while following the Byzantine plot requires a map and a flashlight.

Final word: Not necessarily an enduring work but an admirable sketch of modern "espiocracy" by a writer who knows its secrets better than most.

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