Okay, another book of Mom's. I feel this is one of those "classic" books I should have already read already, along with some Lovecraft (check) and Dostoyevsky (check). So, through this slog of a month (holy moly, barely any books this month, and yet I am right on schedule with my original goal of one book a week - goals are weird sometimes), I finished this one just as the month was ending.
Holy crap, the ending of this book.
This book is worth reading for the ending alone.
The book, aptly titled, is about a spy who came in from the cold, which is to say, he'd been a spy in the post World War II, East vs West Berlin, Cold War not-quite-around era. A large part of the spy's network had been killed off, with the protagonist, Alec Leamas witnessing the death at the beginning of the book of his last spy, who almost got out of East Berlin.
So, for Alec to retire, he needed to do one more job, one more before he could come home, a final clean up job. It meant defecting, so he did. In the process he fell in love.
Such things never end well in the spy world.
There were many references to George Smiley, which I vaguely recall as the hero in a series of spy books that a high school classmate of mine really liked and devoured. I suspect, as a result, that this is an offshoot of that series, tangential to the series, maybe a wrap up.
I enjoyed the book, as far as spies doing spy things and the uncomfortable secrecy and the people being cruel to people sort of things involved in those spy things can go. If spy thrillers are your thing, and you haven't already read a bunch, this is a good one to start with.
But that ending. Wow.
This book, The Way Into Chaos: Book One of The Great Way (Volume 1), is the first of a three book series. It was written by Harry Connolly, who wrote about the Twenty Palaces series, which I think was recommended by Jim Butcher, and which I really liked. I vaguely recall being a little thrown off by Connolly's writing style in the Twenty Palaces novels, but I had read them just after I had read a few Dresden books, and, well, anything is going to seem odd after reading them (because they are awesome).
Oh, good lord, when is the list of books from my mom going to end? I swear, I've read more of her books this year than I have of mine. No, wait, that's not quite true. Feels like it, though.
I've read all of the main books of the Old Mans war by Scalzi. I really like Scalzi's works, with a few minor exceptions, and those mostly because they seem derivative and not Scalzi in all his glory. So, when the Human Division came out, even in its serialized format, I devoured it. The serialized format was torturous in the slow release, but awesome in the suspense that it built. The End of All Things was released in the serialized format, but, for some reason, all my new author alerts missed them. It wasn't until Luke mentioned starting it that I remembered I even had the book, auto-purchased on in Kindle format.
Talk about a breaking dry spell. I hadn't finished a book in two weeks, and was, thankfully, under a deadline to 
Not recommended.