cover image The Third Circle

The Third Circle

Brendan Howley, Bren Howley. Viking Books, $17.95 (296pp) ISBN 978-0-670-83017-6

This complex first novel features a stock figure in espionage thrillerdom--the ex-spy forced back into ``the game'' against his will--but it is far from standard fare. Marty Prevadello, ex-cop as well as former agent, is blackmailed into action when an old partner who is now part of a power struggle in the U.S. intelligence community cuts off his pension. The time is 1972, and Prevadello's ``milk run'' is to go to Vienna and meet a defecting Russian double agent. Major Chertkov, however, is more than just another spy coming in from the cold. Nearly three decades earlier, while hiding from the Germans in a monastery in the French Alps, Chertkov had been given a tattered photograph and a metal canister by one of his mortally wounded rescuers. Those items hold the key to the real secrets behind the decades of double agents, triple crosses and the unexpected relationships that only Prevadello and one other will ever know. Few readers will anticipate all the twists and stunning revelations at the end of this compelling yarn. (Mar.)