When we first meet Alex Matthews, he is on an errand for his old friend, the CIA Director. Matthews had once served as Moscow Station Chief. Now, having left the Agency nine years earlier, he is in Moscow running an investment firm. But this night he is on his way to meet BYRON, a spy he’d...
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Ex-spies have written a lot of the very best espionage novels. John le Carré, of course. John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps). Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal). Jason Matthews (Red Sparrow). Charles McCarry (The Miernik Dossier). Alma Katsu (Red Widow). David McCloskey (Damascus Station)....
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She was Graham Greene and Eric Ambler’s contemporary, and all her nearly two dozen spy novels were bestsellers. (Four were adapted to film: Above Suspicion, Assignment in Brittany, The Venetian Affair, and The Salzburg Connection.) In books that appeared from 1941 to 1984, Helen MacInnes...
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Murder mysteries predominate among the countless novels of suspense that crowd the shelves in bookstores and libraries. The stakes are obvious when a murder takes place. Someone has snuffed out a human life. By contrast, a crime such as counterfeiting represents a lower order of threat—or at...
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After 17 years as an officer in the CIA’s Clandestine Service, Amanda Cole chafes under diplomatic cover in Rome as the economic attaché. She’s bored. And her boss, three decades her senior, frustrates her every attempt to take the initiative. Then a nervous Russian walk-in describes a...
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Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I, ruled England for nearly a century (1509-1603). Together, they and the ambitious men and women surrounding them have furnished historians and novelists alike with unmatched opportunities for dramatic stories of passion, intrigue, and betrayal. The Matthew...
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Many of the popular thrillers published in the U.S. tend to revolve around the CIA, the KGB, or Nazis. High Crimes is a notable exception. It centers on the neglected topic of U.S. military intervention in Central America under the Reagan Administration. And author Joseph Finder shows no love for...
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Many novels of Cold War espionage, especially those that make their way to television or film—feature hard-boiled spies on dangerous assignments east of the Berlin Wall. But William Boyd’s outstanding new novel of Cold War intrigue is nothing like that. His protagonist, Gabriel Dax, is a...
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Journalist Harry Brett had visited Spain in 1931 with a schoolmate, Bernie Piper, and returned six years later. Then, Bernie had gone missing while fighting along with Communist volunteers against Franco’s nationalist forces. It’s now another three years later, 1940-41, and the civil war is...
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Offices on the building’s seventh floor feature plush carpets, wood paneling, and other signs of their elite occupants. Because the best appointed of these offices accommodate Finn Gosford, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Deborah Sweet, known as Debs, the agency’s...
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In the dramatic conclusion to John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, British intelligence officer Alec Leamas and the idealistic American Communist Liz Gold die as they climb the Wall toward freedom in the West, machine-gunned on the orders of the British agent they had entered...
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Since 1987, David Ignatius has written a total of a dozen outstanding spy novels. At the Washington Post, where he writes about foreign affairs, he has gained an immense store of knowledge about US activity abroad, both aboveground and below. It shows in every one of his novels. Here, I’m...
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Over the past decade, I’ve read and reviewed nearly 200 espionage novels (not counting a great many more I never finished). My 15 favorites—well, make that 16: I couldn’t choose—are listed immediately below. Though my preliminary list included multiple titles by several of the authors...
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Does a farce need to be funny? Wikipedia defines farce as “comedy that seeks to entertain an audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant, ridiculous, absurd, and improbable.” To me, it seems doubtful that Alex Gerlis set out to create a farce when he wrote...
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When Hannah Arendt introduced the word totalitarianism into the English language in 1951, she had in mind the Stalinist and Nazi regimes in the USSR and Germany. But, as later scholars have made clear. neither government had achieved a level of control over its citizenry that could be described as...
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Uncle Nathan is a gangster, and Daniel’s father—a judge, no less—wants him to stay as far away as possible from his crooked brother. Then the problem solves itself. A disagreement—the kind you don’t walk away from alive for long—persuades Uncle Nate to leave Berlin for the United...
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David Ignatius writes a column twice a week on foreign affairs for the Washington Post. That’s his day job. But he moonlights as a spy novelist. In eight conventional spy thrillers published from 1987 to 2011, he detailed the give-and-take in the intelligence game between the United States...
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A real war in space might already have broken out in the skies above Ukraine. In Low Earth Orbit (LEO) a thousand miles up, some 4,000 Space X Starlink satellites share space with the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope. As we learned in 2022, Ukraine’s armed forces depended...
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Shane Collins is fifty-two and divorced, a heavy drinker two months into his last posting for the CIA. It’s 2012, and the Middle East is aflame in the Arab Spring. King Jassim of Bahrain, as much as any ruler, is vulnerable. Seventy percent of the population is Shia, and half are guest...
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On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, setting off a fast march to German reunification. But it was not a singular event, arising out of the blue. Because the reform movement launched by Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow four years earlier had triggered a series of increasingly assertive protest...
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Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.