Spytime **

** Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton, William F Buckley Jr, 2001

Being a big fan of Buckley's Blackford Oaks spy novels, I decided to give this book a whirl. Angleton was the head of CIA counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975 and Spytime is a novel based on Angleton's career. It's been almost two decades since I read a Blackford Oaks novel so I could be wrong, but I recall them as being more engaging than Spytime. It's a decent enough read, but not something I found myself dying to get back to.

Halfway through the book a b-story starts, featuring one of Angleton's operatives and almost nothing of Angleton, and goes on for 120 pages (over a third of the book) before it is rather abruptly cut off 40 pages from the end of the book. I found that a little annoying.

But if you're a fan of spy novels, or of history, this might be the book for you.