The Nearest Exit

London: Corvus, 2010 9781848876002. Softcover. Fine. First edition. First printing. Complete number line. No annotations or inscriptions etc. 404 pages. Olen Steinhauer grew up in Virginia, and has since lived in Georgia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Massachusetts, and New York. Outside the US, he's lived in Croatia (when it was still a part of Yugoslavia), the Czech Republic and Italy. He also spent a year in Romania on a Fulbright grant, an experience that helped inspire his first five books. He now lives in Hungary with his wife and daughter. The first rule of Tourism is not to let it ruin you. Because it can. Easily. The Department of Tourism is an ultra-secret black-ops branch rumoured to carry out the CIA's dirtiest and deadliest work. Most agents don't even believe it exists. Milo Weaver knows otherwise. Trained to kill cleanly and keep moving, he is a Tourist that understands the rules. Don't ask questions. Don't form attachments. Don't look back. But Milo is the only Tourist with a daughter. When he is told to assassinate a teenage girl, his commitment to the cause starts to crumble and for the first time, he disobeys his orders. The consequences pull him down into a complex world of clandestine government warfare, but Milo's own battle is with his conscience. When a security breach threatens the very existence of Tourism, will he choose to save his job, his family or himself? Faced with the potential dissolution of his marriage and the end of his quiet, settled life, reluctant spy Milo Weaver has no choice but to return to his old job as a "tourist" for the CIA. But before he can get back to the dirty work of espionage, he has to prove his worth to his new bosses. Armed with a stack of false identities, Milo heads back to Europe, and for nearly three months every assignment is executed perfectly. Then he's instructed to kill the fifteen-year-old daughter of Moldovan immigrants, and make the body disappear. No questions. For Milo, it's an impossible task, but ignoring his handlers is equally untenable. Suddenly he's in a dangerous position, caught between right and wrong, between powerful self-interested foes, between patriots and traitors-especially now that he has nothing left to lose...This edition of the book is the deluxe, tall rack mass market paperback. .