Perhaps the oldest literary ancestor of Blood Tie is Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad (1869, but over the decades the tone of novels describing American innocents abroad has changed from comic to somber, as American power has grown in the world. Henry James started the trend with his tales of American women who got themselves into trouble in Europe, a kind of story which bred many imitators. In Blood Tie, American women are still getting themselves into trouble in Turkey, and for the most part they are still walking away and letting others pay. Their pattern of individual behavior is atrocious, but when the pattern of behavior is adopted by the CIA, it has the makings of foreign policy disaster, as described in Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955) and similar works.

Blood Tie has much in common with The Quiet American, except that Ariadne shows that not all...