Book Review: "Our Kind of Traitor"

John le Carré's latest is Our Kind of Traitor, (Viking, 2010), in which a young English couple find themselves unwittingly drawn into a high-stakes international spy game. While on a relaxing vacation in Antigua the pair meet a Russian family, whose patriarch, Dima, gloms onto them quickly and secretly admits to being a major money launderer who wants to be protected by the British intelligence community in exchange for information on a major financial deal that's about to go down (at the conclusion of which, he fears, he's in for a not-very-pleasant end if he can't get out of the way).

Perry and Gail manage to contact the right people back at home, and after some tense weeks of "familiarization" are sent to Paris with a team of "Service" agents to try and pluck Dima and his family out harm's way just in the nick of time.

The characters didn't do much for me, and the plot seemed much too contrived to have actually gone off the way it does. That said, if you need a break from whatever else you've been reading and want a fairly light spy potboiler, pick this one up. It won't keep you up late reading, but I was certainly curious enough about what was going to go wrong that I finished it. And in the expectation that something was going to go wrong, I was not disappointed in the least.