Since his reemergence with the publication of The Old Boys, Charles McCarry has been heralded as one of the few espionage writers whose books break out of the genre to shine as brilliant novels. The Secret Lovers is a McCarry tale at its finest– an exploration of the spying game, but also a riveting psychological portrait of a man ensnared by his own profession.

A courier delivers a dissident Russian manuscript to Paul Christopher early one morning in West Berlin; minutes later, the courier is dead. Meanwhile in Rome, Christopher's wife takes a lover to stir her husband out of his stoicism. These two seemingly discrete events set in motion a spiral of Cold War intrigue, both personal and political, that leads Christopher from Europe to the Congo. In this relentlessly suspenseful novel, McCarry, who "surpasses Len Deighton and John le Carre" (Washington Post), builds his multilayered story to a outstandingly satisfying end.