An Expensive Place to Die

Name: An Expensive Place to Die
Rating: 3.8 (389 reviews)

by Len Deighton Book 5 in the Harry Palmer series.

First published 1967

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3.7(389)

Paris in the 1960s is the setting for a web of surveillance, blackmail and intelligence rivalry. A British agent becomes involved with a discreet clinic whose wealthy clients make it an ideal source of compromising information. What begins as observation develops into a contest among British, French and other interests, with personal relationships used as instruments of policy.

The city’s restaurants, offices and private apartments form a sophisticated but threatening landscape in which information has a market price. Deighton treats espionage as a business of leverage and misdirection, leaving the agent to work out which secrets matter and which have been planted to make him act.