review: missing man by barry meier

In Missing Man: The American Spy Who Vanished in Iran, Barry Meier details the life of Robert Levinson from his days as an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to how he came to disappear in Iran in 2007. Unfortunately some of those details are still not known as Levinson remains missing. Without some sort of revelation as to Levinson’s status now, Missing Man felt unfinished but Meier does an excellent job of pulling together multiple sources to reveal Levinson’s likely role as a contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency. Meier writes that Levinson was not on an officially sanctioned mission, but was in Iran to gather intelligence (the specifics of which are unclear, but Levinson’s cover story of investigating counterfeit cigarettes is clearly false given the information Meier shares). Missing Man is a meaty book that paints a picture of the real man behind the spy headlines.

About the audiobook: There are a lot of details and names in Missing Man that make the audio format less than ideal—it would’ve been nice to be able to go back to reference previous instances of a person’s appearance in the narrative. Ray Porter narrates with a level tone that works for this journalistic accounting of events. The audio version runs 8.5 hours and was published by HighBridge in May 2016.
4/5
Review copy provided by Audiobook Jukebox. For more information: http://www.helpboblevinson.com/