Silbert, Leslie: The Intelligencer

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Leslie Silbert's erudite thriller follows the investigations of two intelligence operatives working parallel cases some 400 years apart. Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, in the last month before his fatal stabbing (in May of 1593), uncovers a smuggling operation and ruffles some highly placed feathers. And in our own century, private investigator/secret agent/quondam Renaissance scholar Kate Morgan is juggling two cases, one the attempted theft of a 400-year-old packet of intelligence documents from the safe of playboy Cidro Medina, and the other an 11-million-dollar payoff by art dealer Luca de Tolomei to an Iranian intelligence officer.

Of the two interlaced stories, Kate Morgan's is the more engrossing. It is not so thrilling as to keep anyone up past bedtime, and the storyline which does prompt some concern for Kate's safety peters out disappointingly in the end. The flow of the primary tale, meanwhile, is disrupted by Marlowe's story, which punctuates Kate's in roughly alternating chapters. But The Intelligencer is worth the read because it is clever and because its principal character--Kate, not Marlowe--is so well-delineated and likeable. The secondary players in Kate's universe are intriguing as well: her secret agent boss with a classics degree from Princeton, her father the senator, her dead fiance. We can look forward to learning more about them in subsequent books, as Kate is evidently intended to anchor a new series: according to the jacket blurb, the author is currently at work on a second Kate Morgan novel.