| Books and the Spies Who Love Them |
May 10, 2010
The Book of Spies by Gayle Lynds is a riveting thriller, based on the age-old legend of Ivan the Terrible's lost library. The library dates back to the wedding dowry of Sophia of Constantinople upon her marriage to Ivan the Great. Passed on to her son, Ivan the Terrible, the library might have contained histories of Livius, De Republica by Cicero, and stories by Suetonius, as well as early Christian texts and documents. After the death of Ivan the Terrible, a search was instigated by the Pope to find the library but it had vanished.
In Lynds' version of the story, The Book of Spies, Ivan's library is called the Library of Gold, and it is up and running, although covertly. This Library of Gold does indeed hold all of the world's most coveted texts, including the complete collection of plays by Aristophanes (all forty of them), pre-Gnostic Gospels bound in gold, and other texts thought to be destroyed or lost centuries ago. The library also contains a text made up by Lynds, a book entitled The Book of Spies; it was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible to assist him (and others) in their terribleness.
The library has been held
in trust by a bunch of wealthy book lovers who will stop
at nothing to keep their library hidden, their money growing, and their
minds and bodies fit for all sorts of competition, including challenges of a textual nature and physical confrontations to the death. When one of the librarians sneaks The Book of Spies out of the library, the trustees seek vengeance and a new librarian. But the new librarian has his own ideas of preservation of text (hint: shave hair) and a wife left for dead (his death), who just won't quit. Add in an ex-military intelligence officer investigating the death of his father, a CIA renegade with the power to manipulate, a few rare book experts, assassins, a Pashtun war lord, and a host of heavies from across the globe, a quiz show-style challenge game with "old books" as the topic and lives hanging in the balance, and The Book of Spies turns into an exhilarating ride.
The Book of Spies is not only exciting, it is informative. Lynds has done her research well and the interspersed facts about books, writers, religion, warfare, and the CIA are solid as well as fascinating. All her uncovered facts interplay well with her made-up ones, and together whip up a great ending to a good plot. This is a fun book of international espionage, greed, and desire, and an interesting take on the people who love books, and how far they'll go to protect the books they love.
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