Conspiracy in Kiev


Noel Hynd - 2008
    Or can she? While on loan from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Alex is tapped to accompany a Secret Service team during an American Presidential visit to Ukraine. Her assignment: to keep personal watch over Yuri Federov, the most charming and most notorious gangster in the region. Against her better judgment—and fighting a feeling that she’s being manipulated—she leaves for Ukraine. But there are more parts to this dangerous mission than anyone suspects, and connecting the dots takes Alex across three continents and through some life-altering discoveries about herself, her work, her faith, and her future. Conspiracy in Kiev—from the first double-cross to the stunning final pages—is the kind of solid, fast-paced espionage thriller only Noel Hynd can write. For those who have never read Noel Hynd, this first book in The Russian Trilogy is the perfect place to start.

A Vengeance of Spies: A WW2 Novella


Manda Scott - 2019
    It is an accusation. So, in case you get no further, here is the bald fact. I killed your grandfather. War hides many secrets and some of them are better kept. But the secret of Hut Ten was never that kind: it could have been leaked and a life would have been saved. One man could have made that difference. He didn’t - and vengeance has taken forty years to catch up with him. This thrilling novella is set in the same world as Sunday Times Thriller of the Month, A Treachery of Spies. What the Critics say about Manda Scott: “This is a rich vein for fiction, and Scott does it more than justice, with this beautifully imagined, beautifully written, smart, sophisticated – but fiercely suspenseful – thriller.” – Lee Child THRILLER OF THE MONTH ‘Superb . . . a blend of historical imagination and storytelling verve reminiscent of Robert Harris.’ The Sunday Times “… the most exciting, involving thriller I’ve read in an age, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.” – Sunday Times Bestselling author Mick Herron “Scott gives us expertly wrought espionage fiction that blooms into a meditation on war, intimacy and memory” – Adam Brookes "…an extraordinary blend of the past and present.” – Terry Wogan "…seriously clever writing" – Crime Review "…staggeringly Imaginative." – Val McDermid "“A stunning feat of the imagination and an absolute must-read for lovers of historical fiction. Utterly convincing and compelling.” – Stephen Pressfield "A masterpiece in historical fiction." – New York Times ‘A Treachery of Spies is the equal of Charlotte Gray in its insights into the period and, I would say, beats it for sheer excitement… one of the most gripping spy stories I have ever read.’ Jake Kerridge, S Magazine 'Ingeniously plotted and wonderfully written.' Antonia Senior, The Times 'A fast-moving tightly-wrought thriller. The destination is in fact as unexpected as it’s satisfying - and very thought-provoking.' Robert Goddard 'A Treachery of Spies is a masterclass in thriller-writing. It is a heart-racing, heart-wrenching read, conceived with passion and executed with frightening skill. An awe-inspiring achievement.' Giles Kristian What Readers Say: ✭✭✭✭✭ "What a marvellous blend of history, espionage, mystery and politics. Beautifully written, too!" ✭✭✭✭✭ "The author's writing is absolutely masterful, reminding me of Hilary Mantel's." ✭✭✭✭✭ "Unputdownable, gripping, credible account of WW2 heroism and double-dealing." ✭✭✭✭✭ "A Top-Secret First-Rate Spy Thriller!" ✭✭✭✭✭ "Fascinating historical and political detail, brilliant characters...A powerful read.

The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb


Neal Bascomb - 2016
    They have the physicists. They have the will. What they don’t have is enough “heavy water," an essential ingredient for their nuclear designs. For two years, the Nazis have occupied Norway, and with it the Vemork hydroelectric plant, a massive industrial complex nestled on a precipice of a gorge. Vemork is the world’s sole supplier of heavy water, and under the threat of death, its engineers pushed production into overtime. For the Allies, Vemork must be destroyed. But how would they reach the castle fortress high in a mountainous valley? The answer became the most dramatic commando raid of the war. The British Special Operations Executive together a brilliant scientist and eleven refugee Norwegian commandos, who, with little more than parachutes, skis, and Tommy Guns, would destroy Hitler’s nuclear ambitions and help end the reign of the Third Reich. Based on exhaustive research and never-before-seen diaries and letters of the saboteurs, The Winter Fortress is a compulsively readable narrative about a group of young men who endured soul-crushing setbacks and Gestapo hunts and survived in one of the coldest, most inhospitable places on earth to save the world from destruction.

The Invisible Woman: A WWII Novel


Erika Robuck - 2021
    Virginia Hall wasn't like the other young society women back home in Baltimore--she never wanted the debutante ball or silk gloves. Instead, she traded a safe life for adventure in Europe, and when her beloved second home is thrust into the dark days of war, she leaps in headfirst.Once she's recruited as an Allied spy, subverting the Nazis becomes her calling. But even the most cunning agent can be bested, and in wartime trusting the wrong person can prove fatal. Virginia is haunted every day by the betrayal that ravaged her first operation, and will do everything in her power to avenge the brave people she lost.While her future is anything but certain, this time more than ever Virginia knows that failure is not an option. Especially when she discovers what--and whom--she's truly protecting.

The Hope


Herman Wouk - 1993
    In The Hope, his long-awaited return to historical fiction, he turns to one of the most thrilling stories of our time - the saga of Israel. In the grand, epic style of The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, The Hope plunges the reader into the major battles, the disasters and victories, and the fragile periods of peace from the 1948 War of Independence to the astounding triumph of the Six-Day War in 1967. And since Israelis have seen their share of comic mishaps as well as heroism, this novel offers some of Herman Wouk's most amusing scenes since the famed "strawberry business" in The Caine Mutiny. First to last The Hope is a tale of four Israeli army officers and the women they love: Zev Barak, Viennese-born cultured military man; Benny Luria, ace fighter pilot with religious stirrings; Sam Pasternak, sardonic and mysterious Mossad man; and an antic dashing warrior they call Kishote, Hebrew for Quixote, who arrives at Israel's first pitched battle a refugee boy on a mule and over the years rises to high rank. In the love stories of these four men, the author of Marjorie Morningstar has created a gallery of three memorable Israeli women and one quirky fascinating American, daughter of a high CIA official and headmistress of a Washington girls school. With the authenticity, authority, and narrative force of Wouk's finest fiction, The Hope portrays not so much the victory of one people over another, as the gallantry of the human spirit, surviving and triumphing against crushing odds. In that sense it can be called a tale of hope for all mankind; a note that Herman Wouk has struck in all his writings, against the prevailing pessimism of our turbulent century.

Das Boot


Lothar-Günther Buchheim - 1973
    Over the coming weeks they must brave the stormy waters of the Atlantic in their mission to seek out and destroy British supply ships. But the tide is beginning to turn against the Germans in the war for the North Atlantic. Their targets now travel in convoys, fiercely guarded by Royal Navy destroyers, and when contact is finally made the hunters rapidly become the hunted. As the U-boat is forced to hide beneath the surface of the sea a cat-and-mouse game begins, where the increasing claustrophobia of the submarine becomes an enemy just as frightening as the depth charges that explode around it. Of the 40,000 men who served on German submarines, 30,000 never returned. Written by a survivor of the U-boat fleet, Das Boot is a psychological drama merciless in its intensity, and a classic novel of World War II.

Queen and Country, Vol. 1: Broken Ground


Greg Rucka - 2002
    It's a world of questionable morals. For instance, is it better to assassinate a general in the Russian mafia rather than allow him to peddle more guns and drugs in underprivileged countries? Tara's bosses seem to think so. But the Russian mafia ask their own question -- once someone has taken the life of one of their officers, can they continue to let that person live? Greg Rucka peels back the lid on the traditional espionage story to see the nastiness inside, and Steve Rolston brings it to life with stunning clarity.

Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945


Max Hastings - 2004
    Yet a series of mistakes and setbacks, including the Battle of the Bulge, drastically altered this timetable and led to eight more months of brutal fighting. With Armageddon, the eminent military historian Max Hastings gives us memorable accounts of the great battles and captures their human impact on soldiers and civilians. He tells the story of both the Eastern and Western Fronts, raising provocative questions and offering vivid portraits of the great leaders. This rousing and revelatory chronicle brings to life the crucial final months of the twentieth century’s greatest global conflict.

Assignment in Brittany


Helen MacInnes - 1941
    Three hours ago he had joked with the red-haired pilot over a last cup of hot chocolate. Three hours ago he had stood on English earth. Three hours ago he had been Martin Hearne with 27 years of his life behind him.Now he was Bertrand Corlay, with 26 years of another man's life reduced to headings and sub-headings in his memory. He looked down at the faded uniform which had been Corlay's, felt once more for the papers in the inside pocket.All set. He patted the pocked of the tunic with his earth-stained hand, and smiled grimly. From now on, he would not only have to speak, but think, in French ...

Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz


Thomas Harding - 2013
    In the aftermath of the Second Word War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. One of the lead investigators is Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who is now serving in the British Army. Rudolf Höss is his most elusive target. As Kommandant of Auschwitz, Höss not only oversaw the murder of more than one million men, women, and children; he was the man who perfected Hitler’s program of mass extermination. Höss is on the run across a continent in ruins, the one man whose testimony can ensure justice at Nuremberg. Hanns and Rudolf reveals for the very first time the full, exhilarating account of Höss’s capture, an encounter with repercussions that echo to this day. Moving from the Middle Eastern campaigns of the First World War to bohemian Berlin in the 1920s to the horror of the concentration camps and the trials in Belsen and Nuremberg, it tells the story of two German men- one Jewish, one Catholic- whose lives diverged, and intersected, in an astonishing way.

Secret Sanction


Brian Haig - 2001
    When the legal maverick is assigned by the top brass to investigate a Bosnian massacre in which a Green Beret A-team and the Kosovo Liberation Army detachment they were "advising" got trapped behind Serbian lines, he gets the subtext that's part of his orders. What the Army doesn't need are headlines about the cold-blooded execution of 35 Serbian soldiers, and they're counting on Drummond to clean things up fast, before a public scandal blows dirt all over their medals. Drummond is provided with two associates to help with the investigation: an attractive young woman captain who's a Harvard Law School graduate, and an equally illustrious Judge Army General's Corps lawyer whose reputation precedes him.Once Drummond and his team get to Bosnia, it's clear that the accused Green Berets have their own cover-up going, and they're not going to make it easy for the lawyers to figure out what happened. Drummond has a few tricks up his own sleeve, and when he finds out that his CO has put a spy on his team, he's even more determined to get to the bottom of what really went on, even if he has to bully his way out of a murder frame-up to do it. The moral dilemma Drummond faces when he learns the real story (and understands why the Army is so desperate to keep the cover-up going) reveals the man behind the maverick, and lifts Brian Haig's novel a cut above the genre. Haig might have spent more time making his secondary characters as interesting as his protagonist and tightened up his narrative. Still, fans of military thrillers will find this a good enough read.

Rosa


Jonathan Rabb - 2005
    But for Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner and his young assistant, Hans Fichte, the revolution is a mere inconvenience. Four women from the slums of Berlin have turned up dead, all with identical markings etched into their backs, and Hoffner and Fichte have spent the better part of six weeks trying to crack the bizarre case.Things take a troubling turn when the political police begin to show an interest in Hoffner's investigation. Hoffner has no idea why the Polpo would want to get their hands dirty with a serial murderer, until he is shown the lifeless body of Rosa Luxemburg, the same eerie markings on her back. Rumors abound that Rosa, one of the leaders of the suppressed socialist uprising, was assassinated by an angry mob, but the pattern carved into her back tells a different story.

The Bridge Over the River Kwai


Pierre Boulle - 1952
    In a prison camp, British POWs are forced into labor. The bridge they build will become a symbol of service and survival to one prisoner, Colonel Nicholson, a proud perfectionist. Pitted against the warden, Colonel Saito, Nicholson will nevertheless, out of a distorted sense of duty, aid his enemy. While on the outside, as the Allies race to destroy the bridge, Nicholson must decide which will be the first casualty: his patriotism or his pride.

Flight of the Intruder


Stephen Coonts - 1986
    Former Navy flyer Stephen Coonts gives an excellent sense of the complexities of modern air raids and how nerve-wracking it is, even for the best airmen, to technically solve sudden problems over and over, knowing that even a twist of fate like a peasant wildly firing a rifle from a field could wipe out the crew. Grafton alternates between remorse over the fate of his unseen Vietnamese victims on the ground and a gung-ho "let's win this war" sentiment that lashes at both policymakers who select less-than-important targets for the dangerous missions and advocates for peace back in the States.

Night Soldiers


Alan Furst - 1988
    A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalin’s purges, Khristo flees to Paris. Night Soldiers masterfully re-creates the European world of 1934–45: the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for Eastern Europe, the last desperate gaiety of the beau monde in 1937 Paris, and guerrilla operations with the French underground in 1944. Night Soldiers is a scrupulously researched panoramic novel, a work on a grand scale.