Second Sight (Paul Christopher Series #5)

by Charles McCarry

Overview

A legendary CIA agent is called out of retirement to combat an unknown enemy in this sweeping international spy thriller.

Second Sight is the seventh thriller in the critically acclaimed series that follows CIA Agent Paul Christopher—a man ensnared by a line of work that never failed to exert its insidious influence outside professional boundaries.

Now retired and living the quiet life as a loving husband in Washington, D.C., Christopher has survived battlefields of World War II, undercover Cold War killing grounds, and imprisonment in China. But now, throughout the Arab world, U.S. agents are being kidnapped and brain-drained by an unidentified enemy armed with a diabolical new drug.

Christopher’s old friend and superior in “the Outfit” calls with a command he feels he must obey. But what begins for Christopher as a global manhunt swiftly turns into something far closer to home. For the key to the danger he must defuse is a secret buried deep in his own perilous past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781468300406
Publisher:	ABRAMS, Inc.
Publication date:	09/01/2022
Series:	Paul Christopher Series , #5
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	215,008
File size:	943 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles McCarry is the author, most recently, of Christopher’s Ghosts, and has written ten acclaimed novels featuring Paul Christopher and his family. During the Cold War, he was an intelligence officer operating under deep cover in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
A former operative for the CIA, Charles McCarry (b. 1930) is America’s most revered author of espionage fiction. Born in Massachusetts, McCarry began his writing career in the army, as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes. In the 1950s he served as a speechwriter for President Eisenhower before taking a post with the CIA, for which he traveled the globe as a deep cover operative. He left the Agency in 1967, and set about converting his experiences into fiction. His first novel, The Miernik Dossier (1971), introduced Paul Christopher, an American spy who struggles to balance his family life with his work. McCarry has continued writing about Christopher and his family for decades, producing ten novels in the series to date. A former editor-at-large for National Geographic, McCarry has written extensive nonfiction, and continues to write essays and book reviews for various national publications. Ark (2011) is his most recent novel.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Second Sight is a deliciously subtle and fulfilling novel, the end of a great river of loves. This is the seventh and last novel of a unity which contained more truth and emotion that any other 'spy novel' of that large conspiratorial genre." -Richard Condon

Editorial Reviews

The author calls this the last chapter in the Paul Christopher saga that has occupied him on and off since The Miernik Dossier (1973). Christopher has remained a somewhat shadowy figure, though there is no denying McCarry's remarkable narrative gifts, his imaginative use of little-known information and his insider's knowledge of the CIA. All have been put to better use in previous Chrstopher books than here, however. Second Sight is, to put it mildly, overstuffed, with a narrative that goes all the way back to biblical times and embraces pre-WW II Germany as well as the present. It's a complex tale involving Christopher, his heroic German mother, his daughter who was brought up among a lost Israeli tribe in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, an exotic psychic, an elaborate plot to destabilize the Outfit (read: CIA) and kill Jews, and the current and former Outfit directors. At times McCarry's political views blur his usual sharpness, as in a ludicrous portrait of a highly successful, leftist TV guru; at others, the arcane knowledge he usually interweaves so skillfully seems wilfully dragged in. It's a tribute of sorts that he makes such a high-flown saga readable at all, but his inability to create human characters rather than symbols and his fatal lack of le Carre's wit and sophistication in dealing with often similar material make this an ambitious, if intermittently entertaining failure. 35,000 first printing; author tour. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A mixture of espionage, adventure, and family saga, this enthralling novel is the latest in McCarry's Paul Christopher series. Agents of ``The Outfit,'' a CIA-like secret organization based in Washington, are being kidnapped and drugged with a truth serum that compels them to spill vital agency secrets. Paul Christopher, former Outfit operative, is brought out of retirement to attempt to foil the plans of the villains. Into the picture steps Christopher's long-lost daughter Zarah. The band of Jewish nomads that helped raise her is being threatened by the very same organization that threatens the Outfit. A marvelously drawn cast of characters join forces against evil in this compulsive page turner for public libraries.-- Bettie Spivey Cormier, Charlotte-Mecklenburg P.L., Charlotte, N.C .

Library Journal

"Second Sight is a deliciously subtle and fulfilling novel, the end of a great river of loves. This is the seventh and last novel of a unity which contained more truth and emotion that any other 'spy novel' of that large conspiratorial genre." -Richard Condon

From the Publisher