Robert Littell is the undisputed master of American spy fiction, hailed for his profound grasp of the world of international espionage. His previous novel, The Company, an international bestseller, was praised as "one of the best spy novels ever written" (Chicago Tribune). For his new novel, Legends, Littell focuses on the life of one great agent caught in a "wilderness of mirrors" where both remembering and forgetting his past are deadly options. Martin Odum is a CIA field agent turned private detective, struggling his way through a labyrinth of past identities - "legends" in CIA parlance. Is he really Martin Odum? Or is he Dante Pippen, an IRA explosives maven? Or Lincoln Dittmann, Civil War expert? These men like different foods, speak different languages, have different skills. Is he suffering from multiple personality disorder, brainwashing, or simply exhaustion? Can Odum trust the CIA psychiatrist? Or Stella Kastner, a young Russian woman who engages him to find her brother-in-law so he can give her sister a divorce. As Odum redeploys his dormant tradecraft skills to solve Stella's case, he travels the globe battling mortal danger and psychological disorientation. Part Three Faces of Eve, part The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and always pure Robert Littell, Legends―from unforgettable opening to astonishing ending―again proves Littell's unparalleled prowess as a seductive storyteller. What does a spy novel look like after the end of the Cold War? Littell provides quite an answer. A former Newsweek reporter, he has produced an entertaining romp through post-Soviet Russia. Reviewers found plenty to quibble with, most notably Littell’s surprisingly cliché-ridden prose. But in exposing the tensions of Russia’s transition to capitalism, Littell approached the genre with creativity. He doesn’t overlook the War on Terror, either; Al Qaeda gets a walk on. The plot line of Odum’s struggle to figure out his true identity struck some readers as a bit forced—but others thought it added depth, bringing rich layers of meaning to what otherwise might have been a stock genre piece. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. Get this: rumpled Brooklyn PI Martin Odum is not sure who he really is, having lived so long and so convincingly under the assumed identities--legends--in his work for the CIA. Hired to find the missing Samat so that his abandoned Israeli wife can get a proper divorce, Odum tracks his man across the continents, stumbling over a plethora of shady dealings that make Eric Ambler's Dimitrios seem small-time: plastic explosives, opium, bioweapons, suspicious quantities of fertilizer, the relics of a Lithuanian saint. All of which may or may not connect to the past exploits of Martin's other selves: the brash Irish dynamiter Dante Pippen, who infiltrates Hizbullah, and the disaffected Civil War buff Lincoln Dittman, who penetrates al-Qaeda. Littell's sardonic style is reminiscent of the wry slouch-and-dagger intrigue of the late, great Ross Thomas, enthusiastically embellished with spy lore and geopolitical anecdote. No respecter of the classical unities, Littell imbues his tale with the same split personality of its protagonist, veering from jocose banter to grim torture, but for readers prepared to follow his lead, he delivers a smart, fun, strange adventure in the legendary tradition of Odysseus, yet another wily trickster who boasts to his peril that he is "no man." David Wright Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Now and then novels come along of such originality and power that they blow me away. Legends joins that...list. -- Washington Post, May 09, 2005 Who is Martin Odum? A retired spy, or a "legend", a false identity created by the CIA? The answer is in the gripping new novel by the author of 'The Company'. Robert Littell was born, raised, and educated in New York. A former Newsweek editor specializing in Soviet Affairs, he left journalism in 1970 to write fiction full time. He has been writing about the Soviet Union and Russians since his first novel, the espionage classic The Defection of A.J. Lewinter . He is the author of 18 novels, including the critically acclaimed The Debriefing , The Sisters , The Once and Future Spy , the New York Times bestselling The Company , and Legends . 1993: THE CONDEMNED MAN CATCHES A GLIMPSE OF THE ELEPHANTTHEY HAD FINALLY GOTTEN AROUND TO PAVING THE SEVEN kilometers of dirt spur connecting the village of Prigorodnaia to the four-lane Moscow-Petersburg highway. The local priest, surfacing from a week-long binge, lit beeswax tapers to Innocent of Irkutsk, the saint who in the 1720s had repaired the road to China and was now about to bring civilization to Prigorodnaia in the form of a ribbon of macadam with a freshly painted white stripe down the middle. The peasants, who had a shrewder idea of how Mother Russia functioned, thought it more likely that this evidence of progress, if that was the correct name for it, wa