Word: deightons
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...SINKER by Len Deighton (HarperCollins; $21.95). The master plotter winds up his six-volume espionage saga about British agent Bernard Samson and his spying wife Fiona, whose defection to East Germany is finally explained...
What spy novelist Len Deighton tries here must be nearly impossible: winding up a closely plotted six-volume thriller -- lugging all the bodies offstage and making sure that each one has a tag attached to a toe -- and still writing a creditable novel. He makes a good job of it with a clever change of focus...
...This breach of marital etiquette caused Samson endless problems -- how to find a suitable nanny for the children, whether to marry his young mistress, how to prove that he himself was not a Soviet mole, and so on -- detailed moodily and lengthily in the two most recent novels of Deighton's double trilogy, Spy Hook and Spy Line...
...matters. As Bernard had pretty much figured out by the end of Spy Line -- and as the KGB was surely on the point of discovering -- Fiona had been a double agent all along, playing a delicate and deadly game for the cozy old establishmentarians who run Britain's spies. Deighton persuades the reader to take this shell-and-pea shuffling more or less seriously by giving real weight to Fiona's predicament. She is bright and tough, but the pressure of remembering her lines and her lies has worn away her resilience. She worries about going mad, about having already...
...many writers, male or female, have invented a woman spy as well drawn as Fiona or a spy fiction as wry and sinewy as this one. But do Fiona and Bernard reunite and live happily ever after? Deighton, at the end of some 2,000 admirably umbrous pages, wisely fails...