Genre: Mystery & Thriller
Length: 336 pages
Audiobook Length: 5 hours and 28 minutes
First Published: 2015
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Publisher’s Description
Six years ago in Vienna, terrorists took over a hundred hostages, and the rescue attempt went terribly wrong. The CIA’s Vienna station gathered intel during those tense hours, assimilating facts from the ground and from an agent on the inside. So when it all went wrong, the question had to be asked: Had their agent been compromised, and how?
Two of the CIA’s case officers in Vienna, Henry Pelham and Celia Harrison, were lovers at the time, and on the night of the hostage crisis Celia decided she’d had enough. She left the agency, married and had children, and now lives in idyllic Carmel-by-the-Sea. Henry is still a case officer in Vienna, and has traveled to California to see her one more time, to relive the past, maybe, or to put it behind him once and for all.
But neither of them can forget that long-ago question: Had their agent been compromised? If so, how? Each also wonders what role tonight’s dinner companion might have played in the way the tragedy unfolded six years ago.
Quotes from All the Old Knives
Perhaps it’s only those who don’t know us at all who are able to see us most clearly.
An image of an image, which is a perfect place to live if you want to be something other than what you once were.
While our expectations for the future are all that really keep us going, the failure of those expectations is the source of all our sadness.
About Olen Steinhauer
Olen Steinhauer is an author whose works include The Tourist, The Cairo Affair, and All the Old Knives. Raised in Virginia, Steinhauer currently lives in New York and Budapest, Hungary. Visit the author’s website →
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