The Cold War is over. ‘David’ and his ilk were trained as assassins for an elite spy corps. Now he and his girlfriend live quietly outside; ordinary, happy. Until nine years of peace are shattered by the call telling him two of his kind survived and now the best of the best, Luc Planchat, has gone rogue. It’s down to David to ‘document’ him.

Death Will Have Your Eyes tracks this game down the lost highways of North America from Washington to New Orleans. David cruises long straight roads to rolling jazz, stopping off at half-empty towns and truck-stops, watching the America he moves through – ‘poster shops, massage parlors, fast-food bistros done up in Art Deco or lavender and chrome’ – reassuming his mantle in a succession of rented rooms.

But don’t assume you know this book. From page 64: ‘The obligatory car chase was taking place rather early on in the movie.’ This is about aftermaths, about returning, revisiting; the journey is as much interior as exterior. These spies are performers, actors who assume the cars, the costumes of character. We think of Alain Delon in Melville’s astounding Le Samourai, wrapped in his armour-like raincoat, the surrounding film defiantly deconstructing itself in his wake.

There’s no urgency, whether David is hanging out in lazy bars or watching TV in a motel room or being shot at in his car. He carries a book bag with him everywhere. Instead, this is a melancholy book about haunted people and the consequences of the past. We are reminded of directors Monte Hellman and Terence Davis, especially the latter’s plan for a car chase: one car, going very slowly. This book is more content to discuss Chomsky than cross-border intrigue: ‘All the things we cared for so passionately, all the things we believed in so strongly, have come to be of no more consequence than an old sweater, a stamp collection.’ Its violence is brutal but detached. This a book in which the word should is more dangerous than a handgun with the safety off. The espionage novel as existential road movie. Outstanding.