Lost in Shanghai

A young American spy is sent to Shanghai with no more explicit assignment than to learn the language and culture and to wait and see what happens. So begins Charles McCarry's 2013 espionage thriller The Shanghai Factor.

Not much happens other than that some Chinese thugs toss him into a filthy river for no apparent reason. And he has an affair with a beautiful and mysterious young woman, who eventually disappears as suddenly as she appeared in the first place. Then he is offered a job with a big salary and little responsibility by the head of a large Chinese corporation.

Yet soon his job is terminated and our spy is back in the States, still being followed everywhere, as he was in Shanghai, by Chinese stalkers. Then he encounters a woman who is both a wonderful cook and a skilled assassin, a Chinese-American lawyer with whom he attended college and a Chinese spy who wants to recruit him as a double agent.

The tension builds gradually as the reader, like our young American spy, tries to figure out what is going on. And what exactly is his handler, with the unlikely name of Luther Burbank, trying to accomplish?

McCarry has been turning out first-rate spy novels for decades. His readers won't be disappointed with this one.