Much has been made of how the end of the Cold War has affected John le Carré, the period's most popular and critically admired spy novelist. But if anything, Single & Single, his fifth novel since the fall of the Iron Curtain, finds this new landscape more complex and fraught with paranoia. Georgian gangsters and other scoundrels have seized the spoils of Perestroika, selling off Russian resources—including scrap metal, oil, and, in a particularly bitter twist of irony, blood—to the West for enormous profits. One such splinter group, the Orlov Brothers, gets its financing from the title firm, a legitimate English merchant bank run by rogue venturer "Tiger" Single. When Tiger's son Oliver, the book's appealingly rueful young hero, discovers that the firm is laundering money from the Orlovs' drug trade, he turns them all in and takes on another identity. After their drug shipments are subsequently seized, the gangsters murder Tiger's lawyer in the Turkish hillside and threaten to do the same to his other employees and their families if the bank refuses to pay a £200 million ransom. Meanwhile, a sum of more than £5 million appears in the trust fund Oliver has set up for his daughter, a not-so-subtle indication that his unscrupulous father has tracked him down. Single & Single begins with the lawyer's murder, a brilliant, self-contained setpiece that showcases le Carré's dry wit as it slowly turns the screws. With a gun pointed at his "beakish but strictly non-violent nose," the lawyer's response runs from arrogant denial to genuine horror and back to arrogance again once his imminent death frees his contempt for his lowlife captors. The book doesn't reach those heights again, and it's easy to get lost in the confusing alliances of international finance, but Single & Single is still an effective, reasonably suspenseful examination of le Carré's favorite themes. The complex interplay between loyalty and betrayal that runs through all the relationships, especially in Oliver's nagging sense of responsibility to his father, shows how far the author's work extends beyond the trappings of the espionage genre.