“Autonomy,” says the Black Book of Tourism, “is the most attractive aspect of Tourism. State taxes, pesky neighbors, and even luggage: When our clothes are dirty, we’ll just buy new ones. Travel light, leave little trace, and avoid the practicalities most poor citizens must deal with. It’s born out of that teenager inside us who wishes we had a bottomless credit card and could move, day-to-day, week-to-week, for the rest of our days. I knew that at any moment, if necessary, I could disappear. It’s a world without roots, carrying within it all the pros and cons this suggests, and until the birth of my daughter, the rootlessness of the expat felt like a powerful thing to possess. It’s neither the home you’ve left behind, nor an adopted culture-instead, it’s somewhere in between: a country of the mind, in which English is the national language, the Habsburg buildings are an outdoor museum made just for you, and because of your disconnection from the culture, you can arrange your daily details pretty much as you’d like. I’d never been a spy, committed murder, or smuggled state secrets across borders, but for the previous six years I’d lived as a novelist in Budapest, living in that tenuous non-place where many expatriates exist. The idea of a Tourist as a kind of intelligence agent sprang out of my own lifestyle in 2007.

* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners. In The Tourist, Olen Steinhauer-twice nominated for the Edgar Award-tackles an intricate story of betrayal and manipulation, loyalty and risk, in an utterly compelling novel that is both thoroughly modern and yet also reminiscent of the espionage genre’s most touted luminaries. With new layers of intrigue being exposed in his old cases, and with the CIA and Homeland Security after him, he has no choice but to go back undercover and find out who’s been pulling the strings once and for all. Soon Milo is drawn into a conspiracy that links riots in the Sudan, an assassin committing suicide, and an old friend who’s been accused of selling secrets to the Chinese. But staying retired from the field becomes impossible when the arrest of a long-sought-after assassin sets off an investigation into one of Milo’s oldest colleagues and friends. In this contemporary international thriller that is reminiscent of John le Carré and Graham Greene, Milo Weaver has tried to leave his old life of secrets and lies behind by giving up his job as a “tourist” for the CIA-an undercover agent with no home, no identity-and working a desk at the CIA’s New York headquarters. Most of them want to kill you.”- The Black Book of Tourism “There are tourists from all over the world.

The tourist steinhauer