Marvelous post-Cold War spy thriller about Finn, an Iraq 1 veteran whose hot air balloon lands in an Indian reservation and Parsifal, a long-dormant Soviet assassin revived for a new series of wetwork operations. Someone is shaking down the Indian's casino and anyone who tries to do anything about it meets with an accident. Finn looks into the shakedown and Parsifal receives instructions to off him. But why is a Soviet agent doing hits for what appears to be a Mafia operation?

Littell has been called the American LeCarre, and it's a well-earned title. His espionage novels are clever, nasty, full of twists, betrayals, bitter ironies and terrible human costs. The end of the Cold War doesn't faze him in the slightest. The intelligence game endures, deadly and terrible and self-sustaining. This is a tight, sharp, tense thriller as Finn and Parsifal work their way back up the chain of command to get to the truth. Riveting. ( )

Robert Littell's spy stories vary somewhat in quality. This story, Walking Back The Cat, about Love, Death, Honor, WetWork and Hot-Air Baloons is a solid B+ in 'my' book! ( )

It's the story of a KGB assassin who's been deactivated by virtue of perestroika and glasnost, only to be suddenly called out of his unwilling retirement and sent to kill various people whose threats to Russian security seem marginal at best. After he meets one of his targets, a Gulf War vet (the book was written in 1996, before the current misadventure), he gets suspicious. The two of them combine to determine who it is that is ordering these killings and why, and the result is a wonderfully taut thriller. It takes Littell only 220 pages to do what it took Ludlum 544 pages to do in The Bourne Identity; the plots are very similar.

I unreservedly recommend it. ( )