The Tourists by Christopher Reich

Published by Thomas & Mercer on October 14, 2025

Mac Dekker was a field operative (more specifically, an assassin) for the CIA. In Matterhorn, the first novel in this series, “he’d been betrayed by his best friend and made to look like a Russian double agent. Unable to prove his innocence, he’d faked his death and escaped to the village of Zinal in the Swiss Alps.” Dekker’s best friend was a mole who, some years after Dekker’s disappearance, was responsible for the death of Dekker’s son.

Dekker begins the novel in Paris, where he plans to propose to a Mossad agent named Ava Attal. A month earlier, Dekker’s former boss at the CIA, Don Baker, appeared in Zinal and offered Dekker a return to his former status, complete with back pay, a promotion, and nullification of the “red flag” order to kill him on sight. The offer requires him to remain out of sight, avoiding contact with anyone from his former life, apart from his daughter, Jane McCall, who is serving as the CIA’s acting chief of station in Berlin. Dekker is happy with the deal because it gives him the freedom to live wherever he likes and removes his concern that an assassin’s bullet will find him if appears in public.

In Paris, Dekker takes Ava to a restaurant in the Eiffel Tower where he plans to pop the question. Just as he’s about to pull the ring from his pocket, Ava gets a call on her cellphone. She tells Dekker she needs to have a private conversation and disappears into the hallway. When she doesn’t return, Dekker searches the area, then returns to their hotel. Ava isn’t there because (the reader soon learns) she was abducted from the restaurant. Dekker searches her luggage and wonders why she brought a gun on their romantic getaway. Could it be that Ava was on a secret mission?

The story follows Dekker as he searches for Ava with the clandestine help of his daughter. A female assassin makes occasional appearances. She’s after Dekker, whose return to the CIA’s protection is short-lived after he breaks the rules by involving his daughter in his search for Ava. The red flag has been reinstated, another complication in Dekker’s life.

Interwoven with Dekker’s story are scenes involving Tariq bin Nayan bin Tariq al-Sabah, the second son of the emir of Qatar’s first wife. The older son, Jabr, has been groomed to take over when the emir dies. Prince Tariq won’t inherit the throne so he’s dedicated himself to spending money, hooking up with beautiful women, and hobnobbing with the elite. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. Tariq earns money of his own as a social media influencer. People are apparently fascinated with the myriad ways in which wealthy men can waste their money and the women who sleep with them.

Tariq is orchestrating one of those diabolical plots that are common in modern thrillers. Jabr has negotiated a treaty between Israel and Gulf countries that is supposed to bring prosperity for all. Tariq opposes the treaty, in part because he is jealous of Jabr, in part because he hates Jews. Tariq has made an unholy alliance with Israel’s defense minister, who believes the treaty will undermine Israel’s regional supremacy. This struck me as plausible; other readers might disagree. I'm not sure how many readers value plausibility in a thriller, so perhaps it doesn't matter.

Tariq plans to use a small nuclear weapon that ISIS pilfered from Israel, a nuke that can only be triggered with the right transmitter and codes that only Israel possesses. Tariq’s plan is to kill the participants at an international conference in Paris where the treaty will be signed, killing his brother and securing his position as emir while eliminating any hope of peace between Israel and the Gulf states.

Christopher Reich flavors the novel with regional history, some of which he invents or embellishes in interesting ways. Reich creates detailed histories of key characters. The reader is challenged to decide whether Ava is a good guy or a bad guy, assuming those terms have clear meanings in the Middle East. None of this bogs down a story that moves at a steady (but not frenetic) pace.

Paris is the intersection point between the story of Ava’s abduction and Tariq’s plan to explode a tactical nuke. The mystery of Ava’s abduction is unsurprising but deftly executed. Action scenes at the story’s end require the protagonists to engage in a clichéd race against the clock, but what would thrillers be without those races?

The novel would probably make a decent movie, albeit one that would need to be dumbed down a bit, as political nuances in the story don’t translate well to Hollywood films. I prefer Reich’s financial thrillers because they play to his strengths (he was an investment banker before he started selling novels), but The Tourists is nevertheless a successful espionage novel, one that is consistent in quality with Reich’s body of work.

RECOMMENDED

Invasion of Privacy by Christopher Reich

Published by Doubleday on June 16, 2015

Invasion of Privacy is an old-fashioned conspiracy thriller that is updated with modern technology. In the past, the bad guys had to break into the good guy's home to manually erase answering machine messages or steal compromising photographs. These days, they remotely erase text messages and photographs from smart phones.

Joe Grant is an FBI agent who specializes in electronic surveillance. He is in Austin, working on Operation Semaphore, which has something to do with a wealthy and somewhat batty CEO named Ian Prince and a supercomputer called Titan. As the operation goes sideways during a meeting with an informant, Joe manages to call his wife, Mary, and leaves her a message that the FBI would prefer she didn't have. Why he leaves a cryptic voicemail for Mary instead of, for example, calling someone with a gun who might be able to help him is something I never quite understood.

When the message disappears from her phone, Mary understands that she can't trust the FBI. She is one of two individuals who want to get past the FBI's cover-up. The other is a drunken ex-journalist named Tank. The drunk who manages to pull himself together long enough to do battle against the forces of evil is a stock character in Thrillerworld. Tank is likable but far from unique.

Every family in Thrillerworld has a kid who happens to a superhacker. Mary's daughter Jessie fills that role in Invasion of Privacy. She is such a trite addition to the story that she's really a subtraction from it. Her contribution (apart from teenage angst) consists of jetting off to a hacker's convention to engage in activities that are both predictable and impossible to believe.

Too much of Invasion of Privacy has the familiarity of a thriller written on autopilot. Christopher Reich made his reputation as an author of complex financial thrillers, but Invasion of Privacy only gives a passing nod to the world of finance while focusing on chase scenes, high-tech surveillance, stereotypical hackers, and more chase scenes.

In addition, too much of Invasion of Privacy is contrived. The cryptic message Joe leaves for Mary is so cryptic that he could not possibly have expected Mary to figure it out -- except she does because otherwise, the plot would grind to a halt. No FBI agent would take valuable evidence of a criminal investigation home and leave it in a "gadget box" but Joe does because if he didn't, the plot would grind to a halt.

Here's what's really shocking: I enjoyed reading Invasion of Privacy even while I was rolling my eyes. The ending is something of an anti-climax but it's reasonably satisfying. The story moves quickly which, given its lack of depth or complexity, is a good thing. The characters are shallow but likable. Invasion of Privacy is an undemanding, predictable novel but it's fun. Still, I expected more from Reich.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Prince of Risk by Christopher Reich

Published by Doubleday on December 3, 2013

A conspiracy is afoot and the only (good) people who know about it are the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. Until they die. Just before their car explodes on the White House lawn, the head of the NYSE texts the word Palantir to his estranged son, hedge fund master Bobby Astor, whose ex-wife, Alex Forza, happens to be an FBI agent. Astor has no idea what Palantir means, but he is determined to find out. The conspirators, of course, are aware of the text, knowledge that puts Astor's life in peril. In the meantime, Astor has made a bet that Chinese currency will be devalued, a gamble that places him in financial peril, to the extent of losing 400 million dollars.

Global conspiracies are plentiful and far-reaching in the word of thrillers. This one involves electronic surveillance of 57,000 influential people (mostly in government and business). Impressive but credible, given the resources of the conspiracy's backers. Is the conspiracy farfetched? In some respects, yes, but no more farfetched than is common in modern thrillers. Apart from one scene at the end, nothing about the story made me unwilling to suspend my disbelief, in part because Reich includes convincing detail about the conspiracy's design. Of course, a reader who is more knowledgeable about software or the mechanics of Wall Street financial transactions might not be as easily convinced as I was. And even to the extent that I was unconvinced, the story is so fun that I easily overcame my skepticism.

The story features -- wait for it -- a warrior monk. I have to admit that I wasn't expecting a warrior monk to show up on Wall Street, but Reich somehow makes it work. In fact, Reich makes a lot of things work together in this entertaining joinder of a financial thriller with an international conspiracy thriller. He builds tension as several storylines weave together and he advances the plot at a steady pace. His characters are flawed in ways that make them interesting but they never become thoroughly unlikable. Alex's characterization as a self-righteous a-hole is realistic, even if the prayers she says while standing before a portrait of J. Edgar Hoover are a little over-the-top. At the same time, these are the conventional characters of genre fiction, developed without richness or texture. That's one of the novel's only weakness, and it's a small one given that this is a plot-driven story. The other, again small, is that the plot features few surprises (other than the appearance of a warrior monk), but I enjoyed it all the same.

RECOMMENDED