Using Loose Lips as her point of departure, Claire Berlinski's entirely new drama of love and espionage is both a suspenseful spy drama and an arch comedy about romance. A fictional Claire - a novelist who lives in Paris, like the real Claire - falls in love with The Lion, a man she has never seen. The poetic Persian archeologist, who claims to be a fan of Loose Lips, sends lush, melancholy e-mails to her from Iran. When she decamps at his suggestion for Istanbul, she discovers that he is not at all what he seems. But who is he? A rich, multi-layered novel that perfectly captures the obsessive erotic compulsion of an e-mail relationship, the personal betrayals real espionage always involves, and the inevitability of discovering that people are not what we long for them to be, Lion Eyes contains stories within stories, characters within characters, ideas within ideas. A true mousetrap.