I love spy stuff. Absolutely love it. While I certainly share the love of our culture for the big, flashy heroes, like Superman or Spider-Man, there's a dark, cynical romantic in me that prefers the thought that the real heroes operate in a world of shadows, unknown and unheralded. And when they die, lies are told to their families and the country they died for never learns of their sacrifice.

Of course, most of the spy literature doesn't reflect this sort of thing. A lot of the blame for this goes to the James Bond stories, where our dashing hero tracks down gleefully flashy madmen with a penchant for unnecessarily complicated death traps. Don't get me wrong--I love James Bond, XXX, and the Bourne stuff. But all of these things are lacking one really important thing, and that's realism.

Enter Greg Rucka, and the brilliant comic book series Queen and Country. Now this is the kind of spy literature I can get into. Rucka doesn't deal with uber-competent swashbucklers who chase down madmen bent on world domination. The spies of Queen and Country deal in much more real, dangerous, and morally ambiguous territory. Wet work. Infiltrating terrorist cells. Risking your life to find a roll of microfilm you know is somewhere around here. Dealing with budget cuts. Being helpless to stop an idiotic bureaucrat from jeopardizing a mission because he has the right political connections.

Dealing with this level of realism, there's of course a very real danger of getting too dry and too boring. Not to worry with Queen and Country, though. Greg Rucka writes real characters stuck in both extraordinary and mundane situations. There are very real tender moments, as well as pulse pounding action that keeps you turning pages so you can see what .... happens ... next ...

Bottom line: Queen and Country is a damn fine read, and I'd recommend picking up the first book and seeing for yourself. You won't regret it. Though you might get mad at me when you realize that there are seven collected books so far--and that you'll end up having to buy them all. Plus all the new ones when they come out, too.

Oh, and if you're not a comics fan, and don't want to be seen with that "rubbish," you'll be delighted to learn that Greg Rucka has just penned a Queen and Country novel. The new novel, A Gentleman's Game is in bookstores everywhere this week.