The Night Manager is an espionage novel by British writer John le Carré, published in 1993. It is his first post-Cold War novel, detailing an undercover operation to bring down a major international arms dealer. Plot summary Jonathan Pine, a former British soldier, is a night manager at a hotel. Pine has a complex character with a military background and schooling at the Duke of York's Royal Military School in Dover. We first meet him in that capacity at the Hotel Meister Palace in Zurich. He is on duty when the "worst man in the world", Richard Onslow Roper, arrives with his entourage on a cold, blizzardy night. Roper is a billionaire criminal who traffics illegal arms and drugs. The novel is about Pine's preoccupation with undoing Roper's criminal enterprise, which began earlier, in Cairo, where Pine was working as the night manager at the luxurious Queen Nefertiti hotel. One night in Cairo, Pine met Sophie, a French-Arab woman, the mistress of the hotel owner, Freddie Hamid, who had ties to Roper. Sophie characterised Roper as "the worst man in the world". She provided Pine with incriminating documents, asking him to forward them to the Egyptian authorities. Pine did so but disregarded her warning that Roper had ties to British intelligence. He forwarded copies to a friend with MI6. A short time later, Sophie was murdered. Several years later, Pine is working in Switzerland. He is approached by ex-SIS Chief Leonard Burr and his senior civil servant backer Rex Goodhew, who have set up a small counter arms-proliferation office and are planning an elaborate sting operation against Roper. Eager to avenge Sophie, Pine agrees to go undercover to infiltrate Roper's vast criminal empire. All the while, however, the operation is jeopardised by an inter-agency turf war within the intelligence community, with a suspicion that collusion with Roper is taking place somewhere. Burr's operation, a joint effort between his group and sympathetic American colleagues, is code-named "Limpet." The first stage requires Pine to fabricate a criminal identity and cover story and head to the Bahamas, the location of Roper's primary residence. Pine wins the confidence of Roper by "rescuing" his son from a phony kidnapping orchestrated by Burr and suffering a severe beating from the "kidnappers". When Pine recovers, Roper recruits him into his organisation, in preparation for his latest and largest illegal arms deal, with a Colombian drug cartel. Unknown