John Le Carré will forever be identified as the quintessential chronicler of the Cold War, with its covert stratagems and crushing malaise. But since the Cold War's end, he has only expanded his field of vision, finding new pockets of corruption and power around the globe. An exemplary mix of dense plot mechanics, rich character study, and impassioned polemic, Le Carré's latest thriller, The Constant Gardener, battles the great contemporary bogeyman: greedy, nefarious multinational corporations. Moving beyond Le Carré's familiar Eurasian turf, the story opens in the luxuriant offices of the British High Commission in Nairobi, Kenya, where loyal diplomats and spies reside comfortably amid poverty and chaos. Their complacency is shattered by the news that Tessa Quayle, the young, beautiful estranged wife of dutiful mid-level bureaucrat Justin Quayle, has been brutally slain near Lake Turkana, the site often referred to as the birthplace of mankind. A tireless champion of Kenya's disenfranchised, addressed in one headline as "Mother Teresa Of The Nairobi Slums," Tessa was traveling on an ostensible charity mission with Arnold Bluhm, a handsome African doctor widely assumed to have been her lover. The couple's car is discovered with its driver beheaded and Tessa badly beaten and violated inside, but with Bluhm absent from the scene. When he first hears of the tragedy, Justin, an archetypal English gentleman, absorbs the gruesome details with a courage that seems to border on apathy; a fellow diplomat is secretly appalled to see him playing a game of Monopoly that same afternoon. There are even early suspicions that he ordered the killings himself out of jealousy. But murder so banal has no place in a John Le Carré novel, where larger and more sinister forces are always at work. Around the novel's halfway point, Le Carré exhausts the plot's major twists and turns, having already established the heroes and villains in clear, unambiguous terms. Yet The Constant Gardener unfolds with the righteous energy of muckraking journalism, as the author comes to grips with the ruthless plundering of a vulnerable Third World nation. As Justin quietly and persistently investigates his wife's murder, his touching journey brings him closer to understanding her than when she was alive and wakes him from an indifferent slumber. It's heartening to find that Le Carré, now in his 70s, shares Justin's dogged sense of purpose.