Very good book. Edge of seat. ( )

Excellent book of revenge. When infiltration mission goes wrong way Michael Dunne finds himself abandoned by his agency and left high and dry. Finally after his marriage collapses and he ends up in the prison (all of it following his fiasco) Dunne decides to take revenge on the people who brought him down in a most savage way possible.

Author is a person that always does his research and it is very interesting to see spy use of high technology. Author's signature, ruthless intelligence agencies that play double, triple or quadruple deceptions and are always ready to sacrifice their most loyal agents to achieve the national goals, is present in this novel too.

Book centers on something that terrified me first time I saw it - deep-fake technology. Implications of very existence of this technology (that brought only admiration from everyone else I know) are unforeseeable and I highly doubt this type of technology can have any positive applications. For me this technology is very like giving a hand grenade to the toddler - highly, highly irresponsible.

Excellent book, highly recommended to all fans of spy thrillers. ( )

I'd previously read "The Quantum Spy" (good/very good) and "The Director" (pretty good) by this author, but after those two, this one was a very big disappointment - poor characterisation and the idea of highly realistic video fakes, while interesting, is not explored in a very interesting way here. Felt to me a bit like the author was just churning another one out for the sake of it. I guess it depends what you want from your spy books - if you are happy with pretty standard thriller fare, then maybe this will do it for you and perhaps I am being a bit harsh on it. But what I liked about "The Quantum Spy" in particular was that it looked at aspects of the espionage world that have not been written about all that much by others (e.g. quantum computing and China's MSS) - so it felt a cut above your average espionage thriller. ( )

"I mean, that’s the secret, right? It isn’t the electronics. It’s the fact that people are so goddamn stupid.” So says a character in David Ignatius' timely and engrossing new book "The Paladin." Two of my big passions are journalism and computers and this book combines them in a way that was like candy to me. Ignatius is a skilled and veteran journalist and he always brings that level of factual undermining and organized thought to his books. His beat is the intelligence community and that pays off in the complexity of his stories and characters. There is no black and white here, in true LeCarre´ tradition everything is a shade of gray. The story starts out jumping between "current day" and incidents of 2 years earlier that totally changed the life of Michael Dunne, our main character. He does a great job of revealing the story from earlier in a way that lets you slowly begin to see what is going on. The last half of the book is all present day and percolates along to an interesting and satisfying conclusion. This all scares me though as it pertains to the way powerful people now use technology to fool people. With an election coming up I dread the fake videos that will be distributed, I'm already thinking of leaving Facebook until the election is over. But, as the lead quote says, the blame is not with the technology but with the people. And that is the scariest thing of all. ( )

Fair espionage novel of a CIA agent double crossed with cybertechnology. A little above my knowledge but I appreciated the author's experience and inside knowledge of reporting on the CIA. It made it that much more believeable. ( )