And you thought the Cold War was over. Not in A Spy's Life, a taut new thriller about international espionage by Henry Porter, Vanity Fair's London editor. Robert I Harland, a former British intelligence agent, has tried valiantly to come in from the cold, but then someone sabotages his plane, it crashes and nearly kills him—and things only get worse from there. For the next 402 pages, a dizzying array of antagonists stalk, beat up, kidnap, arrest, chase, shoot at, and otherwise torment him, from double-crossing ex-colleagues to Russian generals to Serb war criminals. Although Harland is now on special assignment for the secretary-general, even at U.N. headquarters someone’s henchmen knock him out, administer cocaine to simulate a self-inflicted overdose, and try to pitch him out the window. Deftly orchestrating a byzantine plot and a multinational cast of characters. Porter creates a chilling global masquerade in which no one is who he (or she) pretends to be—not even the love of Harland’s life. Many years ago, he gave his heart to the beauteous Eva, a Czech spy who vanished behind the Iron Curtain -only to re-appear decades later via the strange young Internet whiz who insists he’s Eva and Harland’s son. Even the boy is up to his eyeballs in skulduggery. “We were all bom to treachery,” proclaims the ultimate bad guy, a protean character who turns out to be running a vast global criminal network from his laptop. Cast Harrison Ford as the battered, world-weary Harland and you’ve got a postmodern Bond for the 21st century.