The Honourable Schoolboy

The 1970s Hong Kong le Carré renders is a city of typhoon shelters and Wan Chai bars, where Cold War intelligence runs on favors, fear, and back-channel gossip. George Smiley dispatches his most reluctant field agent, Jerry Westerby, to trace a network of compromised assets across the colony's maze of junks and tower blocks — and deeper still into Cambodia. The second novel in the Karla trilogy has a particular quality of damp heat; no other spy fiction has made this harbor feel so burdened, so watchful.