“All the Old Knives” by Olen Steinhauer – The Last Dinner

For the most part, spy novels are always about a threat in the immediate future, about saving the country, if not the entire world, right in the nick of time.

We're used to seeing spies as basically being supermen/women who travel the world and put themselves in all sorts of danger because they know it to be the right thing to do.

However, Olen Steinhauer decided to take a slightly different approach with his latest novel, All the Old Knives, preferring to place his focus on the past.

Without going into the plot in too much detail, we are presented with Celia and Henry, two ex-lovers who used to work in the CIA together. While Celia has retired and is now living a normal life is a wife and mother, Henry is still a case officer working in Vienna. They used to work together, and six years ago it all went to all with the Vienna hostage crisis.

Things went South, their agent on the ground might have been compromised, and the whole operation turned into a disaster. Today, Celia and Henry are meeting for the one fateful dinner where deeply-buried secrets will float up to the surface, and where the truth will finally make itself heard.

The first truly striking aspect of this novel is the fact that the story takes almost entirely at the dinner table between Henry and Celia. Their dialogue is the only thing that makes the story progress, and while they do look at the past through flashbacks and whatnot, we never really have the impression of leaving the table.

As a matter of fact, Steinhauer takes great care in crafting the entire dinner scene to ensure that you feel like you're sitting there with them, a silent and invisible spectator for whose benefit the whole spectacle is being conducted.

As a result, this type of set-up is conducive to Steinhauer displaying perhaps his greatest strength as a writer, the ability to create very complex, deep and lifelike characters.

He really does make the most out of this opportunity and drags deep within the recesses of the protagonists' minds, exposing their hopes, desires, fears, struggles, hatreds, joys and memories.

They aren't necessarily good or evil people, but rather they fall into that moral grey area the vast majority of us spend our lives in. In the end, chances are you'll have mixed feelings about these flawed people who feel as real and human as the people you meet on the street.

Looking at the mystery itself, it really is interesting to see Celia and Henry figure out step by step what happened six years ago during that chaotic hostage crisis that defined their lives forever.

We keep on wondering what role our two protagonists really ended up playing in that bedlam, and who was responsible for compromising the integrity of the operation; was it someone in the CIA? Someone close to Celia and Henry? Could it have been one of them? As the thread unfolds, more and more surprising discoveries keep you hooked into a conspiracy that seems to grow larger and larger.

Perhaps the only potential drawback of the book is the passivity with which things unfold. Because we are talking about events that happened years ago, there is no real sense of urgency to speak of, no real suspense as to what will happen in the next moment.

In other words, it's a much calmer type of spy novel, one where the main focus is the resolution of a conspiracy through logical thinking, rather than stopping a villain from starting a nuclear war at the last second. It's slower than your typical spy book and there isn't much action to speak of.

To conclude, if you are looking for a solid espionage novel that goes easier on the pace and the action in favour of cerebral work, then All the Old Knives is definitely a book you will want to check out; it's original, entertaining and captivating... what more could a book offer?

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Olen Steinhauer Personal site Olen Steinhauer is an American writer whose main forte are spy fiction novels. The Tourist is perhaps one of his better-known works, having found its way into the prestigious New York Times Best Sellers list. So far, his only standalone novel not part of The Yalta Boulevard Sequence or The Milo Weaver Trilogy is The Cairo Affair.