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    The Shanghai Factor
    The Shanghai Factor
    The Shanghai Factor
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Shanghai Factor

    Written by Charles McCarry

    Narrated by Stephen Bowlby

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    An unnamed spy is dispatched to Shanghai to aid a shadowy U.S. agency known only as HQ. There he meets a mysterious woman named Mei and begins a torrid affair that threatens to expose him to Chinese intelligence, the notorious Guoanbu. As danger waits for him around every corner, and the enigmatic Mei moves into and out of his life, he finds himself drawn further into a deadly cat-and-mouse game between Guoanbu and HQ that threatens not only to end his life but to also dangerously destabilize East/West relations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJun 4, 2013
    ISBN9781622310142
    The Shanghai Factor
    Author

    Charles McCarry

    A former operative for the CIA, Charles McCarry (b. 1930) is America’s most revered author of espionage fiction. Born in Massachusetts, McCarry began his writing career in the army, as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes. In the 1950s he served as a speechwriter for President Eisenhower before taking a post with the CIA, for which he traveled the globe as a deep cover operative. He left the Agency in 1967, and set about converting his experiences into fiction. His first novel, The Miernik Dossier (1971), introduced Paul Christopher, an American spy who struggles to balance his family life with his work. McCarry has continued writing about Christopher and his family for decades, producing ten novels in the series to date. A former editor-at-large for National Geographic, McCarry has written extensive nonfiction, and continues to write essays and book reviews for various national publications. Ark (2011) is his most recent novel.

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    Reviews for The Shanghai Factor

    4.5/5

    8 ratings1 review

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    • 4/5
      A flawed but deeply fascinating novel of a young CIA agent, a fluent Mandarin speaker, who becomes involved in a complex plot hatched by the CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence...but I won't spoil it for you, nor, frankly, could I quite explain it. This a novel very much of words, not action. Yet, the interactions between the interesting cast of characters, the agent, the CI chief, a Chinese spy, the various women in the agent's life, a female assassin, a ruthless Chinese company chief, etc. etc. are so fascinating that the book actually turned into a real page-turner by its last third. Not surprisingly, since the author spent 10 years in the CIA, the mundane work of being a spy is also convincingly portrayed. Not so successful are the backgrounds. New York comes across okay, but McCarry's portrayal of modern Shanghai seems to have come from reading a couple of page on Wikipedia or something. And a scene toward the end of the book, in Suzhou, where the American agent is convinced that if he speaks to a beautiful Chinese woman for more than a few minutes someone will call the police is a bit ludicrous given that the sight of Western expatriate males together with Chinese women is beyond commonplace. Lastly, the book's ending is a bit abrupt, with a multi-year postscript that is a bit out of place with the rest of the text, which treats small incidents with a very close lens. And trying to revisit all the various plot twists after we know what happens at the end is likely to result in realizing that the story is so unlikely as to not make any sense at all--but, still, one job of fiction is to carry you away for a while, and THE SHANGHAI FACTOR succeeded in doing that. McCarry writes very well, and I will remember some of these characters for quite a while. I would definitely be tempted to look into some of his other work.