Spy book a blitz of adventure

Mysterious Press, 401 pages, $26

Robert Olen Butler earned a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993 for “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain,” a short story collection that grew out of his experiences as a military intelligence officer during the Vietnam War.

In his recent series of books about journalist-turned-spy Christopher “Kit” Cobb, Butler has set his character’s rip-roaring adventures against a different war a century ago: World War I.

The first book, “The Hot Country,” took place largely in Mexico, and the second’s setting is featured in its title, “Star of Istanbul.” The third, “The Empire of Night,” begins in London, where Kit has come to see his mother, Isabel Cobb, “one of the great stars of the American stage,” perform the title role in Hamlet (a smashing success).

As it turns out, both mother and son have performances in store. Although the United States has not yet entered World War I — as Kit says, “Wilson was still twisted around trying to find his backbone, even with a hundred and twenty-eight dead Americans on the Lusitania” — U.S. intelligence is working with the British, whose cities are being bombed by a formidable new German weapon, the Zeppelin.

Kit’s other reason for being in London is to meet with his handler and learn about his assignment. He’s undercover as “Joseph William Hunter. Formerly Josef Wilhelm Jager, which I was keeping quiet about. From Chicago he was publishing widely in the German-language newspapers and the German-American English-language newspapers in the U.S.A. He was a damn good writer, sentence to sentence at least, although he clearly had an agenda. He was a justifier and apologist for the home country.”

The plot moves with an accelerating pace from England to Germany, and from research labs (where Kit meets an interesting fellow by the name of Einstein) to an airfield for the enormous Zeppelins, on one of which the breathtaking finale of the book will take place.

“The Empire of Night” is a cracking good spy thriller, with a cast of memorable characters and a terrifically suspenseful plot that will have you casting the movie as you read. And Butler’s elegant writing elevates the book — he is a master of everything from lyrical description to believable dialogue, and he even has some fun with tough-guy repartee.