THE MULBERRY BUSH: CHARLE MC CARRY

I loved Mc Carry's early novels and had not read anything by him in at least 15 years.  Thus, I was excited to see a new thriller come out.  In keeping with spy novels, the narrator never discloses his name.  We learn early that his father, a bit of an iconoclast, worked for the CIA until he broke too many rules and they drummed him out, without a pension.  As a result, he lost his wife, son and job and ended up homeless, dying in the street, as the narrator discovers.  He decides to wreak revenge on the Headquarters, what Mc Carry calls the CIA.  Because of his skills with languages, he speaks five or six, he sets himself up as a prime candidate for the CIA and is soon recruited by friends of his father's, no doubt somewhat guilty over his father's treatment. His scheme takes him to Helsinki, Bogata, and Berlin, as he makes his reputation for brilliance.

He meets Luz, in Buenos Aries, and quickly falls in love with her, despite the fact she is the daughter of a revolutionary, Alejandro Aguilar, now deceased.  There connection seems mostly to be sexual though we later find that Luz uses it to get at the narrator's real self.  They both have a grudge against the Headquarters, Luz for what they supposedly did to her father and mother, throwing them out of a plane after promising them asylum back in the 1970's.  For some reason, Russians are involved in the narrator's plans, mostly because Headquarters is  worried about Russian incursions into South America.  The narrator begins meeting with two Russians who seem to know what happened to Luz's parents and at the same time, seem willing to become spies for the United States.  Complicated right. Anyways, just before one of them defects, his car is blown up.

Towards the end, Luz's Uncle, a friend of her parents, pulls the narrator aside and tells him the truth about Luz's parents, that her father compromised his followers, to save his life and lived on as a drug dealer near Uruguay, before dying a few years ago.  Her mother was thrown from a plane, the result of a CIA agent's anger.  The Uncle wants to avenge this, talks the narrator into bringing this agent back to Argentina, takes him up in a plane, throws the agent out of the door, and then jumps as well. And so the book ends, the narrator sitting in Buenos Aries, no Lux, no agent, no revenge, just alone.