John le Carré. (2013). A Delicate Truth: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group.

John le Carré. 2013. A Delicate Truth: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group.

John le Carré, A Delicate Truth: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group, 2013.

John le Carré. A Delicate Truth: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group, 2013.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/1523-1/{E5A0B3F5-8873-4084-96B9-824A41A90C42}IMG100.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/1523-1/{E5A0B3F5-8873-4084-96B9-824A41A90C42}IMG200.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/1523-1/{E5A0B3F5-8873-4084-96B9-824A41A90C42}IMG150.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/1523-1/{E5A0B3F5-8873-4084-96B9-824A41A90C42}IMG400.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781101618028
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00BC24NT4
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781101618028
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780670014897

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: John le Carré

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

A Delicate Truth

dateAdded

2013-10-18T20:06:00Z

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com?websiteID=141&titleID=1231970
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Delicate Truth A Novel

crossRefId

1231970

subtitle

A Novel

id

E5A0B3F5-8873-4084-96B9-824A41A90C42

starRating

3.8

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: ADelicateTruth_9781101618028_1231970
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 879904
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781101618028
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 5/7/2013
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/delicate-truth-e5a0b3?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: ADelicateTruth_1231970
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00BC24NT4
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 5/7/2013
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/delicate-truth-e5a0b3?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: ADelicateTruth_9781101618028_1231970
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781101618028
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 5/7/2013
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/delicate-truth-e5a0b3?.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: War
2. • value: romance
3. • value: Action
4. • value: Fiction
5. • value: crime
6. • value: assassin
7. • value: novels
8. • value: Thrillers
9. • value: suspense
10. • value: Military
11. • value: spy
12. • value: mystery
13. • value: Drama
14. • value: England
15. • value: Adventure
16. • value: espionage
17. • value: Military Fiction
18. • value: Thriller
19. • value: suspense fiction
20. • value: spies
21. • value: fiction books
22. • value: spy thriller
23. • value: mystery and thriller
24. • value: espionage and spy thrillers
25. • value: spy books
26. • value: spy novels
27. • value: thriller books
28. • value: mysteries and thrillers
29. • value: john le carre
30. • value: spy thrillers
31. • value: espionage fiction
32. • value: mystery thriller suspense
33. • value: books for men
34. • value: suspense books
35. • value: military books
36. • value: war books
37. • value: suspense thriller books
38. • value: books fiction
39. • value: john le carre books

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: le Carré, John
   • name: John le Carré

imprint

Penguin Books

publishDate

2013-05-07T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

A Delicate Truth

fullDescription

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies. 

"A novel that beckons us beyond any and all expectations."—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
A counter-terrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar.  Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister’s personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it.
Three years later, a disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to be—or a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher “Kit” Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely observed by Kit’s daughter, Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and duty to his Service. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, how can he keep silent?

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 18, 2013
     State-sanctioned duplicity drives bestseller le Carré’s entertainingly labyrinthine if overly polemical 23rd novel, which features a corrupt British Foreign Office minister, Fergus Quinn, and an American private defense contractor “best known as Ethical Outcomes.” In 2008, a cloak-and-dagger plot to capture an arms dealer in Gibraltar under the mantle of counterterrorism goes awry. Quinn’s secretary, Toby Bell, who was kept out of the loop, has incriminating information about the mission and the chance to use it three years later when one of the soldiers involved ends up dead and a retired British diplomat, roped into participating against his will, tries to salve his conscience about some nasty pieces of collateral damage. As usual, le Carré (Our Kind of Traitor) tells a great story in sterling prose, but he veers dangerously close to farce and caricature, particularly with the comically amoral Americans. His best work has been about the moral ambiguity of spying, while this novel feels as if the issue of who’s bad and who’s good is too neatly sewn up. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from March 15, 2013
     The distinguished chronicler of Cold War espionage and its costs casts his cold eye on the fog of war and its legacy when the war sets terrorists against the mercenaries and independent contractors to whom international security has been farmed out. A colorless midlevel civil servant is plucked from the anonymous ranks of the Foreign Office, given a wafer-thin cover identity as statistician Paul Anderson and packed off to Gibraltar, where he's to serve as the eyes and ears and, mainly, the yea or nay of rising Member of Parliament Fergus Quinn, who can't afford to be directly connected to Operation Wildlife. On the crucial night the forces in question are to disrupt an arms deal and grab a jihadist purchaser, both Paul and Jeb Owens, the senior military commander on the ground, smell a rat and advise against completing the operation. But they're overridden by Quinn, who says, "I recommend but do not command" that Operation Wildlife be completed. Shortly after its execution, Paul, promised "[m]edals all round," is bundled back into a plane bound for home. Sure enough, he emerges from the hush-hush affair with a knighthood and the unspoken thanks of a grateful monarch. Three years later, however, he happens to run into Jeb and hears the ruined soldier tell a decidedly less glorious story of the operation that involves extraordinary rendition, a dead mother and child, and a callous coverup. At the same time, Quinn's Private Secretary Toby Bell also becomes painfully aware of irregularities in the official record and confronts Jay Crispin, the Houston-based head of the private intelligence firm Ethical Outcomes, for answers. What he gets instead are more questions and personal danger. Resolutely keeping potential action sequences just offstage, le Carre (Our Kind of Traitor, 2010, etc.) focuses instead on the moral rot and creeping terror barely concealed by the affable old-boy blather that marks the pillars of the intelligence community.

     COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from March 15, 2013
     Shockingly, le Carr' no longer writes about moral ambiguity. Gone is any semblance of the notion that a government and its emissaries in the secret services could ever be on the side of the individual. That's been true for several novelscertainly since The Constant Gardener (2001)but le Carr''s latest is perhaps the most definitive statement yet of his new worldview. It starts with a 2008 counterterrorism operation, code-named Wildfire, gone wrong. A team of agents, led by a British foreign minister and a private defense contractor, was charged with capturing a terrorist on the island of Gibraltar. Billed as a rousing success, the op was, in fact, a fiasco. Three years later, a now-disgraced British agent tells the real story to retired diplomat Sir Christopher Probyn, also involved in the mission but in the dark as to what actually happened. Probyn eventually teams with Toby Bell, secretary to the minister in charge of Wildfire. Bell, also in the dark, starts digging and finds he faces a personal crisis: expose the cover-up and scuttle his career or keep quiet. Whistle-blowers risking life and livelihood to bring evil bureaucrats to their knees have long been a staple of espionage fiction. In le Carr''s new world, however, evil bureaucrats never skin their knees; there are no happy endings, even attenuated ones. We commented in our 2008 review of le Carr''s A Most Wanted Man (a film version of which will open in the fall) on the slow, inexorable way that, in the novel, institutional will grinds down individual lives. That grinding process is even more brutal this time around, as le Carr' further establishes himself as a master of a new, shockingly realistic kind of noir in which right-thinking individuals who challenge the institutional order of things always lose. No ambiguity there but plenty of gut-wrenching tragedy. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: It's been nearly 50 years since le Carr' broke through with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He has set the bar ever since for espionage fiction that appeals to head and heart rather than just quickening the reader's pulse.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 1, 2012
     

     Toby Bell, the foreign office minister's private secretary, tries to determine whether a 2008 counterterrorist operation aimed at abducting a jihadist arms buyer went awry. Le Carre's scenarios are up-to-date as his understanding of political intrigue is timeless.

     Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from April 15, 2013
     

     As he approaches the microphone, he adjusts his tie as well as his accent, with just a hint of his Glaswegian upbringing on show, but not too much, of course. Man of the people. "Allegations have been made concerning an initiative undertaken by New Labour, supposedly in concert with the U.S. government and with the support of a fundamentalist U.S. conglomerate on the soil of gallant Gibraltar. I'm here to tell you unequivocally that no such initiative was sponsored by the British government," he lies, and takes a sip of water. Le Carre, the author of such 20th-century classics as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, has nothing left to prove except that he can still be stung into turning out suspenseful, totally convincing political object lessons, as in his attack on the pharmaceutical industry in 2001's The Constant Gardener. His target of choice here is the mendacity of the British government and the easy camaraderie between the public and private sectors. VERDICT This is a guaranteed hair-raising cerebral fright, especially for anyone who enjoyed Robert Harris's The Ghost or who just knows his or her email account has been hacked. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/12.]--Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO

     Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 15, 2013
     

     As he approaches the microphone, he adjusts his tie as well as his accent, with just a hint of his Glaswegian upbringing on show, but not too much, of course. Man of the people. "Allegations have been made concerning an initiative undertaken by New Labour, supposedly in concert with the U.S. government and with the support of a fundamentalist U.S. conglomerate on the soil of gallant Gibraltar. I'm here to tell you unequivocally that no such initiative was sponsored by the British government," he lies, and takes a sip of water. Le Carre, the author of such 20th-century classics as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, has nothing left to prove except that he can still be stung into turning out suspenseful, totally convincing political object lessons, as in his attack on the pharmaceutical industry in 2001's The Constant Gardener. His target of choice here is the mendacity of the British government and the easy camaraderie between the public and private sectors. VERDICT This is a guaranteed hair-raising cerebral fright, especially for anyone who enjoyed Robert Harris's The Ghost or who just knows his or her email account has been hacked. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/12.]--Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO

     Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

754

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/e5a0b3f5-8873-4084-96b9-824a41a90c42/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

e5a0b3f5-8873-4084-96b9-824a41a90c42

starRating

3.8

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/1523-1/{E5A0B3F5-8873-4084-96B9-824A41A90C42}IMG100.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/1523-1/{E5A0B3F5-8873-4084-96B9-824A41A90C42}IMG200.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/1523-1/{E5A0B3F5-8873-4084-96B9-824A41A90C42}IMG150.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/1523-1/{E5A0B3F5-8873-4084-96B9-824A41A90C42}IMG400.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Literature
3. • value: Thriller

publishDateText

05/07/2013

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780670014897

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies. 

"A novel that beckons us beyond any and all expectations."—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
A counter-terrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar.  Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister’s personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it.
Three years later, a disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to be—or a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher “Kit” Probyn, retired British...

sortTitle

Delicate Truth A Novel

crossRefId

1231970

awards

1. • source: The New York Times
   • value: The New York Times Best Seller List

subtitle

A Novel

publisher

Penguin Publishing Group

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC006000
   • description: Fiction / Thrillers / Espionage
2. • code: FIC031000
   • description: Fiction / Thrillers / General
3. • code: FIC032000
   • description: Fiction / War & Military