James Grady knows the secret to writing good spy thrillers: always put extraordinary events into a believable context. It is the carefully-blended combination of imagination and verisimilitude that animates Three Days of the Condor and makes its explosive plot so spine-tingling. Although we know that nothing in the novel ever happened, Grady goes to painstaking lengths to convince us that it could have. The story was also the basis for Sydney Pollack's classic 1975 film, which featured an all-star cast including Faye Dunaway and Robert Redford.

The story is a classic "man on the run" plot, familiar to fans of such films and novels as The Fugitive, Marathon Man and The Terminator. CIA agent Ronald Malcolm, aka "the Condor," works with a handful of other agents out of a nondescript Washington brownstone. When he returns to work from an extended lunch break to find all of his coworkers shot dead, he realizes that only an oversight by the assassins has spared his life. Panicked, he contacts CIA headquarters for help. But when an attempted rendezvous with agents goes terribly awry, Malcolm realizes that no one is to be trusted. He disappears into the streets of Washington hoping to evade whoever is pursuing him long enough to unravel the mystery and save his life.

The atmosphere, as one might expect, is one of unremitting tension and paranoia. The paranoia trades on the sense that something sinister lurks unseen-but only just out of sight-beneath the surface of everyday life. To this end, Grady has rendered his beloved Washington, D.C. in vivid detail, down to the names of real bars, theatres and army-navy stores. The inner workings of the CIA and the array of tactics employed to search for the elusive Condor have been carefully researched and meticulously documented. The end result is believability, a three-dimensional background that makes the adrenalized events of the Condor's six-day (reduced to three days in the movie), high-stakes game of hide-and-seek seem all the more fateful and chilling.