An Honorable Man

February 1, 2016
Set in Washington, D.C., in 1953, Vidich’s well-written first novel is long on atmosphere but short on narrative momentum. George Mueller, who’s at a turning point in his CIA career, feels his sense of purpose, forged during WWII, is being eroded, but he has a real mission: looking for a traitor within the CIA known by the code name Protocol. The agency has identified 20 suspects, and the plan is to turn a Russian agent to help find the spy. This promising setup gets bogged down in a morass of plotting, including a longish digression about a senator resembling Joseph McCarthy. The pace picks up in the latter third of the book when the backstory and description give way to an intelligent, old-fashioned spy thriller. Fans of John le Carré will appreciate the backroom, clubby old-boy network that seemed to define spying in the 1950s. Vidich, a founder and publisher of the Storyville App, discusses his historical sources in an informative afterword. Agent: Will Roberts, Gernert Company.

Starred review from December 15, 2015
Leaving Yale early, George Mueller joined the OSS and parachuted into occupied France to help partisans sabotage the Nazis. After the war, he became one of the first case officers in the new CIA, working in war-ravaged, starving Vienna. But now it's 1953, and Mueller, the titular honorable man, sees himself as a burnt-out case. He wants to resign and become a teacher. But CIA Director Allen Dullesbeset by fears of a Russian mole in the agency, concern about Senator McCarthy's self-glorifying witch hunt for Commies and homosexuals, and the turmoil in Moscow caused by Stalin's deathasks Mueller to stay on and find the mole. 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. His Washington is almost as dysfunctional as today's. The agency must collaborate with the FBI on counterintelligence operations, and ham-handed FBI agents bring their own reporter to ensure fawning coverage for the bureau. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)