Second Sight

Paul Christopher--a onetime secret agent and ten-year inmate of a Chinese prison--is betrayed by a trusted friend, trapped emotionally by his obsessive and jealous wife, and told of his destiny with Meryem, a mysterious woman from his past

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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The seventh and final volume in McCarry's series of novels about poet/spy Paul Christopher and his family. Not far into the story, Cathy, Paul's beautiful, pregnant and wildly jealous first wife, sees him in a Paris park with his new love Molly. Operatically, she vows to raise their child in a place beyond discovery. Luckily, she has just met Lla Kahina (a.k.a. Meryem), an exotic old Berber woman who possesses the second sight of the title. They travel together to Meryem's North African mountain hideaway; Cathy gives birth on a mountain pass before joining Meryem's Ja'wabi, Jews living as Moslems for the past thousand years. For all their secrecy, Hitler's S.S. knew about them (``German thoroughness''), knowledge that has filtered down to a Palestinian terrorist called Hassan, who plans their extermination. By now it's the 1980's, Cathy has been killed by terrorists during a desert ostrich hunt, and her grown daughter, Zarah, has found her daddy in Washington; Paul, the spy game and the Outfit behind him, is living quietly with his second wife Stephanie. But could this terrorist threat to his daughter (``she thinks like a Jew, feels like a Jew, talks like a Jew'') tempt the old warhorse into action one more time, shoulder to shoulder with the retired heads of American and Israeli intelligence, not to mention old buddy (and Outfit head honcho) David Patchen? Sure enough, Paul finds himself in the midst of a perfunctory South of France denouement. That's the gist of the plot. This grab-bag of a novel also includes a long history of the Ja'wabi; scenes from 1920's Paris and 1930's Berlin, where Meryem was Paul's mother Lori's best friend; a rehash of Paul's Vietnam problems (already covered in The Last Supper); and the endlessly delayed revelation of the hidden meaning of Lori's 1939 arrest by the Gestapo. A confusing, unfocused, implausible work, then, arguably the weakest of the series. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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 .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.