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English
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Thriller / suspense fiction

AN HONORABLE MAN

Paul Vidich

Publishers Weekly Top Ten Mysteries & Thrillers of Spring 2016

A debut espionage novel in the style of Alan Furst and John le Carré, AN HONORABLE MAN is a chilling Cold War spy thriller set in 1950s Washington, D.C.

Washington D.C., 1953. The Cold War is heating up: McCarthyism, with all its fear and demagoguery, is raging in the nation's capital, and Joseph Stalin's death has left a dangerous power vacuum in the Soviet Union.

The CIA, meanwhile, is reeling from a double agent within their midst. Someone is selling secrets to the Soviets, compromising missions around the globe. Undercover agents have been assassinated, and anti-Communist plots are being cut short in ruthlessly efficient fashion. The CIA director knows any news of the traitor, whose code name is Protocol, would be a national embarrassment and compromise the entire agency.

George Mueller seems to be the perfect man to help find the mole: Yale-educated; extensive experience running missions in Eastern Europe; an operative so dedicated to his job that it left his marriage in tatters. The Director trusts him. Mueller, though, has secrets of his own, and as he digs deeper into the case, making contact with a Soviet agent, suspicion begins to fall on him as well. Until Protocol is found, no one can be trusted, and everyone is at risk.

Paul Vidich has had a distinguished career in music and media. Most recently, he served as Special Advisor to AOL, Inc. and was Executive Vice President at the Warner Music Group, in charge of technology and global strategy. He serves on the Board of Directors of Poets & Writers and The New School for Social Research. A founder and publisher of the Storyville App, Vidich is also an award-winning author of short fiction. AN HONORABLE MAN is his first novel.

Available products
Book Published 2016-04-01 by Emily Bestler Books (Atria)

Comments

One of Publishers Weekly's top ten mysteries and thrillers for spring 2016 Read more...

As I read An Honorable Man, I kept coming back to George Smiley and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. That's how good this book is. Much like John le Carre and Eric Ambler before him, Vidich writes with a confidence that allows him to draw his characters in clean, simple strokes, creating dialogue that speaks volumes in a few spare lines while leaving even more for the reader to fathom in what's not said at all. At the center of the novel is George Mueller, a man who walks in the considerable shadow of Smiley but with his own unique footprint, his own demons and a quiet, inner strength that sustains and defines him in endless shades of cloak and dagger gray. Pick up this book. You'll love it. Michael Harvey

An Honorable Man is that rare beast: a good, old fashioned spy novel. But like the best of its kind, it understands that the genre is about something more: betrayal, paranoia, unease, and sacrifice. For a book about the Cold War, it left me with a warm, satisfied glow. John Connolly

First-novelist Vidich, a tech executive, debuts with a richly atmospheric and emotionally complex and tense tale of spies versus spies in the Cold War. Vidich writes with an economy of style that acclaimed espionage novelists might do well to emulate. This looks like the launch of a great career in spy fiction. (starred review)

A cool, knowing, and quietly devastating thriller that vaults Paul Vidich into the ranks of such thinking-man's spy novelists as Joseph Kanon and Alan Furst. Like them, Vidich conjures not only a riveting mystery but a poignant cast of characters, a vibrant evocation of time and place, and a rich excavation of human paradox. Stephen Schiff (writer and executive producer for of the acclaimed television drama The Americans)

Poland: Czarna Owca

Paul Vidich's tense, muscular thriller delivers suspense and intelligence circa 1953: the cold war rages and the hall of mirrors confronting reluctant agent George Mueller reflects myriad questions. Just how personal is the political? Is the past ever past? An Honorable Man asks universal questions whose shadows linger even now. Paul Vidich's immensely assured debut, a requiem to a time, is intensely alive, dark, silken with facts, replete with promise. Jayne Anne Phillips

An Honorable Man is an unputdownable mole hunt written in terse, noirish prose, driving us inexorably forward. In George Mueller, Paul Vidich has created a perfectly stoic companion to guide us through the intrigues of the red-baiting Fifties. And the story itself has the comforting feel of a classic of the genre, rediscovered in some dusty attic, a wonderful gift from the past. - Olen Steinhauer

Cold War spy fiction in the grand tradition--neatly plotted betrayals in that shadow world where no one can be trusted and agents are haunted by their own moral compromises. Joseph Kanon