A Wilderness of Mirrors

Dev Stryker, the pseudonymous offspring of a husband and wife writing team with 30 million book sales and three Edgars between them, is back with the aptly named A Wilderness of Mirrors, the first Amelia Pierce outing since 1993's Deathright. As the book opens, wrongfully disgraced ex-CIA agent Burt Sergeant is teaching his wife Amelia, herself the daughter of a murdered CIA agent, to fly a Cessna, and Amelia is contemplating divorce--until she spots a body.

Not that one event had anything to do with the other. The divorce had been a long time coming; the body was a surprise. It was just that for the past hour or so, while Burt was ostensibly teaching his wife the rudiments of flying, Amelia had been fantasizing about crashing the seaplane into the side of a cliff.

Fortunately for the sanctity of marriage, there's nothing quite like a washed-up (literally) American youth who officially doesn't exist to ruin a reverie. Add to that hordes of mysterious twins who may hold positions of power at the highest levels of America's government. Mix it up further with Russian defector and ex-head of the KGB Grigor Valentinin, the opportunistic CIA Caribbean Chief of Station David Stanhope, under-the-gun Assistant Deputy Director of Operations Bill Avery, and his very strange deputy, Danny Zotter. Then factor in lepers, zombies, and Shining Path guerrillas, and you've got yourself a good-to-the-last-Andropov of a spy novel.

Stryker has delivered a fast-moving, well-populated, sparingly written (almost too much so) poser that will likely have you flipping pages leftward nearly as often, and as fast, as you flip them to the right. --Michael Hudson