"Robert Ludlum with a sense of humor," Detroit News One of the Most Acclaimed Espionage Novels Ever Written... And Also One of the Funniest. It's the mid-1980s and the cold war hasn't thawed. The Library, a super-secret U.S. espionage agency is keeping an eye on the Russians and everybody else. A dozen elite intelligence experts relentlessly sift out classified information from everywhere. They know all the secrets except for one - which of the librarians is a traitor. It's up to Walt Coolidge, a librarian with a Sherlockian gift for analyzing people's garbage, to uncover the mole and, if he fails, it could lead to nuclear Armageddon. "A book that administers charm and dismay in beautifully balanced proportions," Los Angeles Times "Tough, funny, quirky, bawdy, suspenseful. I defy any reader to guess where this story is going... I predict a long, hearty life for this novel." Bestselling author John D. MacDonald writing for USA Today "Deftly plotted and smoothly written, several cuts above the norm," Cosmopolitan "Sharp, fresh, beguiling, somewhere between 'Dr. Strangelove' fantasy and dead-on-target Washington reality," Kirkus "Highly entertaining, the plot is marvelously intricate, wild and still somehow plausible...a truly wonderful book" New York Daily News