The Intelligencer

By: Leslie Silbert

Narrated by: Jan Maxwell, Alfred Molina

On May 30, 1593, London's most popular playwright was stabbed to death. The royal coroner ruled that Christopher Marlowe was killed in self-defense, but historians have long suspected otherwise, given his role as an "intelligencer" in the queen's secret service.

In 16th century London, Marlowe embarks on his final intelligence assignment, hoping to find the culprits behind a high-stakes smuggling scheme.

In present-day New York, grad student turned private eye Kate Morgan is called in on an urgent matter. One of her firm's top clients, a London-based financier, has chanced upon a mysterious manuscript that had been buried for centuries, one that someone is desperate to steal. What secret lurks in those yellowed ciphered pages? And how, so many years later, could it drive someone to kill?

As Kate sets off for England, she receives a second assignment. An enigmatic art dealer has made an $11 million purchase from an Iranian intelligence officer. Is it a black-market antiquities deal, or something far more sinister? Like Marlowe, Kate moonlights as a spy, her P.I. firm doubles as an off-the-books U.S. intelligence unit, and she is soon caught like a pawn in a deadly international game. As The Intelligencer's interlocking narratives race toward a stunning collision, and Kate closes in on the truth behind Marlowe's sudden death, it becomes clear that she may have sealed a similar fate for herself.

©2004 Leslie Silbert (P)2004 Simon & Schuster, Inc., AUDIOWORKS is an imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Critic reviews

"The pace is quick and the action fascinating." (School Library Journal)

Tries to do too much - doesn't succeed

This is a great premise and it could have been a fascinating book, but it tries to pull two complicated plots together - mideast espionage and Elizabethan spy rings - unsuccessfully. In trying to do too much it doesn't do anything well.
The best story line was the Christopher Marlowe intrigue but there was not enough of it. The Elizabethan spy ring is fascinating but the presentation is sketchy and brief making you want more - then you don't get it.
Possibly suffering from abridgment, it is basically a competently written but unbalanced story that has some good passages.