The Little Drummer Girl
John le Carré
 Martin Kurtz, an Israeli spymaster, recruits Charlie, a radical left-wing English actress,as part of an elaborate scheme to discover the whereabouts of Khalil, a Palestinian terrorist. Charlie's case officer is Joseph. Salim is abducted, interrogated, and killed by Kurtz's unit. Joseph impersonates Salim and travels through Europe with Charlie in order to make Khalil believe that Charlie and Salim are lovers, the goal being that, when Khalil discovers the affair and contacts Charlie, the Israelis will be able to track him down. Khalil does contact Charlie through intermediaries, and she travels to a Palestine refugee camps in Lebanon to be trained as a bomber. She becomes more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and the schizophrenic lifestyle she is forced to live brings her close to collapse. Finally, Charlie is sent on a mission to pretend to place a bomb at a lecture given by an Israeli moderate whose peace proposals are not to Khalil's liking. She carries out the mission under the Israelis's supervision. As a result, Khalil is killed, and Charlie's mission comes to an end. She subsequently has a mental breakdown caused by the strain of her mission and her own internal contradictions. Whereupon, Joseph comes to her aid: "locked together, they set off awkwardly along the pavement, though the town was strange to them." Charlie's motives for helping the Israelis when she is in fact an anti-Zionist are indicative of why the authors' novels are so well loved. The novels are less about character and other literary concerns, than they are primers about the life of a spy that the author lived prior to becoming a novelist. By having Charlie fall in love with the Israeli Mossad agent, "Joseph," and the terrorist, "Michel," the reader is forced to see the similarities between the methods of both the intelligence services of the world, and those of the world's terrorists. The most common and most interesting method for accessing one another's secrets, is the "honeytrap," in which an attractive member of the opposite sex lures a target. As the characters of the Mossad say, in the book, "tether the goat to attract the lion." The similarity of methodology results in the fascinating inner turmoil of both the Charlie, and her beloved Joseph. Readers, too, are forced to consider the ethics of both the terrorist and the intelligence officer. The result is a wonderful ride on the rivers of conscience.