Amazon.com Review
Evan Tanner, the spy who never sleeps, was placed in cold storage at the end of the Cold War--literally and figuratively. But in Tanner on Ice Block defrosts one of his earliest and best series heroes and sends him to Burma to stir up the guerillas, destabilize the country's authoritarian regime, and incidentally assassinate the Nobel Peace Prize-winning daughter of the country's national hero. Before long, Tanner's been set up for murder, drug smuggling, and blowing up Burma's most sacred shrine. Accompanied by a beautiful Russian/French/Vietnamese woman who wants out of Myanmar for her own reasons and has a dwindling cache of precious rubies to pay her way, he snakes through Burma disguised as a monk. Along their journey the two dodge SLORC trackers, insurgent Shan tribesmen, and the henchman of Tanner's mysterious spymaster. In Block's skilled hands, the much anticipated return of Tanner is a perfect summer hammock read. --Jane Adams
From Publishers Weekly
Never one to abandon a sound series hero indefinitely, Block (who recently resurrected burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr) has now also brought back international man of action Evan Tanner, after more than 25 years. As usual, Block has a good joke up his sleeve: Tanner, one of whose characteristics is his inability to sleep, had in fact been comatose?in a deep freeze, in fact?for all that time, and the scene where he wakes up, thinking Richard Nixon is still president, is as funny and sharp as a similar one in Woody Allen's Sleeper. After that, Tanner is off to a new exotic locale, activated as usual by his vaguely CIA manager: this time it's to Burma, where he's supposed to destabilize the government by assassinating a popular opposition figure. He doesn't do it, of course, but becomes involved instead with a beautiful woman who wants to flee the country and eventually, after participating in a guerrilla action, both manage to do so. It's never less than inventive and amusing, but Block is always most at home in Manhattan, and his overseas settings, deftly sketched as they are, lack the ultimate authenticity he finds there. Tanner, too, though endowed with the author's usual wry wit, is not as fully fleshed out as are Block's more recent creations; but this will do until another Scudder comes along.
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