I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about spy books. Because I struggled with finishing Agents of Innocence, and my personal theory on this is that it is so old school that my new school brain had trouble dealing with the very slow pace of this book.
I grew up reading spy novels, written by the masters of espionage -- Helen MacInnes and Len Deighton and Ken Follett -- written in the 1960's through the 1980's. As it turns out, Agents of Innocence was written in the 1980's and it was set in the Beirut of the 1970's. And back in the day, spy books weren't always the constant shoot 'em up, gadget-fest, action-packed books that they are today. Helen MacInnes (whom I loved, by the way) wrote books about pretty damsels in distress and the handsome men who saved them from bad guys during the cold war. Follet's Eye of the Needle was a masterful exploration of how to write suspense.
Books written during the cold war were different. They were much less technology centered, and much more intelligence focused. While I know almost nothing about actual spycraft, it seems to me that it is probably quite boring to be in the intelligence business, 99% of the time. Of course, there must be those moments of heartstopping terror, but they likely just don't come along all that often.
Which is why, I think, that the old school spy novel feels so different from the Lee Child thriller. They are not non-stop action. And, in the case of Agents of Innocence, David Ignatius spent a lot of time on spycraft, intelligence gathering, agent recruitment and relationship building, and very little time on explosions, gunfights, torture, car chases, or MacGuyver-esque escapes. 3 1/2 stars.
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