"Legends" — by Robert Littell

"A novel of dissimulation" is the subtitle of this remarkable book.

Robert Littell, along with John le Carré and Gerald Seymour rank as my three favorite authors of spy and espionage–related fiction currently writing in the English language.

I don't quite know what to do with Lorraine Adams, whose first novel, "Harbor," was astonishingly good; once she brings forth her next book (sooner rather than later, please, if you don't mind) and it's anywhere near her initial effort I'll add her to the Olympian heights of excellence.

Once upon a time Charles McCarry lived there but he's deteriorated markedly with each succeeding book in the past decade.

Robert Littell's first novel, "The Defection of A.J. Lewinter," was superb and he has continued to produce work of high quality though his early books, most notably "The October Circle," "The Amateur" and "The Sisters," still seem his strongest.

That is, before this new one, his fourteenth novel.

Long story short: it's the story of one Martin Odum, who once worked for the CIA.

Martin had other legends, as it were, during his CIA career; Dante Pippen and Lincoln Dittmann were the other lives he led.

But Martin now has a problem: he almost remembers things that should have been forgotten along with the discarded legends.

Such remembering could potentially cause enormous difficulties for the CIA.

So while the CIA simply wants Martin to go to ground and quietly live out his life in retirement, Martin is troubled by things he almost remembers but not quite.

Things that cause him to wake up every night in a cold sweat, shaking.

He decides to walk back the cat, as it were.

And so the novel proceeds.

Littell is a master of dialogue and characterization and the book is alternately scary and laugh out loud hilarious.

Here's the first paragraph:

They had finally gotten around to paving the seven kilometers of dirt spur connecting the village of Prigorodnaia to the four–lane Moscow–Petersburg highway. The local priest, surfacing from a week–long binge, lit beeswax tapers to Innocent of Irkutsk, the saint who in the 1720s had repaired the road to China and was about to bring civilization to Prigorodnaia in the form of a ribbon of macadam with a freshly painted white stripe down the middle. The peasants, who had a shrewder idea of how Mother Russia functioned, thought it more likely that this evidence of progress, if that was the correct name for it, was somehow related to the purchase, several months earlier, of the late and lamented Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria's sprawling wooden dacha by a man identified only as the Oligarkh. Next to nothing was known about him. He came and went at odd hours in a glistening black Mercedes S–600 sedan, his shock of silver hair and dark glasses a fleeting apparition behind its tinted windows. A local woman hired to do laundry was said to have seen him angrily flick cigar ashes from the crow's–nest rising like a turret from the dacha before turning back to issue instructions to someone. The woman, who was terrified of the dacha's newfangled electric washing machine and scrubbed the laundry in a shallow reach of the river, had been too far away to make out more than a few words — "Buried, that's what I want, but alive..." — but they and the Oligarkh's feral tone had dispatched a chill down her spine that made her shudder every time she recounted the story.

This is a superb bedtime reading book and served me admirably in that capacity for the past two weeks.