A Winter Spy

From the first page I was enthralled by the atmosphere of cold war espionage and 1958 New York social life. The plot is well woven, and the characters are fascinating and well developed. For lovers of this book, the author also a very entertaining series under the name Don Winslow. A very much changed Walter Withers is a minor character in one of these.

I've had this book for like two years now and I keep going back to read it again! (My copy is so dog-eared.)I've read it so many times and each time it just gets better, I keep finding more things I like about this book that I missed in previous readings. This is the best book that I have ever read!

The author's style is what makes it work, a mix of Buckley , George Will and LeCarre. Delights in sticking it to all the '50s icons, yet it is a love story, too, with NYC as heroine. Delightfully nostalgic book gave me everything I wanted: spookery, suspense, humor, great characters (really great development too),true action, honest fieldcraft and fun, lots of fun. Yeah, he missed a couple of names, but, so what? Some days I barely remember my own. Hey, this book is so good it kept me up two nights to finish it. I had to keep reading, and for that, I thank Mr lloyd. I sure hope he writes another book, and very soon. I would love to see him bring back the same surviving characters into the White House, into Cuba, Africa and Vietnam. It brought back a world I knew and loved myelf...from NYC in the late '50s, and, then, my later experiences with the military and some of the same feds and spooks he undresses so damned well. Read this book! You can thank me later.

This would have to be one of the best thrillers I have read in the last 12 months. I'd put the author up there with the best Le Carres. The action is cool and understated. What particularly got my admiration was the author's style. I kept reading passages to my wife just to savor Lloyd's prose. I think this is his first novel. I can't wait for the second.

A Winter Spy compares to LeCarre's Smiley as the work of John Irving or John Updike does to that of, say, Norman Mailer. This is not the overwrought, fatalistic novel we've come to expect spy stories set in the fifties to be, thought it's thoroughly rooted in the realities of the day. Its hero, the young Walter Withers, is a spy you love, even though his specialty was setting "honey traps" for hapless Soviets. Back from Europe in New York, the place he feels at home in, he takes us through the Manhattan during the Christmas/New Year's week of 1958-9. It's a time when private investigators sought to expose homosexuals for their corporate employers, while the burgeoning gay, beatnik, and jazz scenes were quietly moving to transform our culture forever from their source in Greenwich Village. With characters representing everyone from Jack Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and James Jesus Angleton to Jack Kerouac, MacDonald Lloyd weaves an amazingly compelling spy yarn that redefines the Cold War thriller