Spy fiction lives and dies on competence — the cool-headed operative making impossible calls under pressure. Apricot Marmalade deliberately breaks that formula. The agents here are spectacularly, consistently, hilariously incompetent, and that’s not a bug. It’s the whole game.
Orey sets his story in Vietnam-era Bangkok, where a US Army Military Intelligence unit competes with the CIA and the Thai government to be the most pointlessly bureaucratic operation in Southeast Asia. The Edmondson transmittal becomes the centerpiece of a plot that escalates in all the wrong directions.
This is Catch-22 with a different war and a different jungle. Orey knows his material cold, and the comedy has real bite.
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