My favorite spy in literature has never been Jason Bourne. It has always been George Smiley, John le Carre's vaguely sad old man of the Cold War.

Le Carre', who had his own, if much less intriguing, history with the British foreign service, might have lost his franchise when the Berlin Wall, and Russian Communism, fell had not Islamic extremists and the age of terrorism come to his rescue.

In his newest book, which made all the "best of" lists for 2008, a half-Russian, half-Chechen, half-crazy muslim arrives in Hamburg, a city still smarting from the fact that it failed to recognize the 9/11 conspirators in its midst.

His cause is taken up by a young, idealistic civil rights lawyer and a banker who is holding millions in dirty money for Russian generals who pillaged the weaker sisters in the breakup of the Soviet Union. It is those millions and their connection to Issa, the victim of terrible torture, that brings the British, American, German and Russian spies together in Hamburg in a typical le Carre' convoluted plot.

Roger Rees does an excellent job of picking his way through the many accents - from Scottish to Turkish to blunt American as he reads this book.

Muriel Dobbin, who once covered the White House for The Sun and who reviewed the print version of the book, makes the excellent point that le Carre' is best when he is writing dialog -- even interior dialog -- and you run the risk of missing a small but crucial turn in the plot if you skip paragraphs or pages in an over-eager attempt to find out what happens next.

Listening to the book on CD helps prevent that, of course.