Design on Danger

I thought that crime and thriller novels were going to be shut out of Slate’s “Best Books of 2006” list entirely, until I discovered the e-zine’s architecture critic, Canadian architect-author Witold Rybczynski, recommending Charles McCarry’s The Last Supper. Rybczynski writes:

This political thriller was actually written in 1986, but Overlook Press has been republishing his tales of Cold War espionage at the rate of one or two a year, so I guess it qualifies as “new.” Like all the best spy novelists since Graham Greene, McCarry creates a world of his own. It helps some that he spent years in the CIA doing undercover work; it helps more that he’s a very good storyteller. I like thrillers; the good ones can be reread many times. I regularly reread early Le Carré (before he turned preachy), and I recently reread all of Alan Furst’s World War II novels. Last year, I found some old Len Deighton thrillers in a used-book store and reread those. They seemed so fresh 40 years ago--oh well.

Slate also has nice things to say about some other books, including Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, Darrin McMahon’s Happiness: A History, Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, and Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Anderson, Graydon Carter, and George Kalogerakis. Read all the recommendations here.