Book picks similar to
The Ambassador by Morris L. West


fiction
literary-fiction
thriller
thrillers

The Blunderer


Patricia Highsmith - 1954
    She is distant and neurotic, and Walter finds himself harboring gruesome fantasies about her demise. When Clara's dead body turns up at the bottom of a cliff in a manner uncannily resembling the recent death of a woman named Helen Kimmel who was murdered by her husband, Walter finds himself under scrutiny. He commits several blunders that claim his career and his reputation, cost him his friends, and eventually threaten his life. The Blunderer examines the dark obsessions that lie beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary people. With unerring psychological insight, Patricia Highsmith portrays characters who cross the precarious line separating fantasy from reality.NB: The title in England was changed to Lament for a Lover.

Captain From Castile


Samuel Shellabarger - 1945
    "Torrid, nonstop adventure. . . . First-rate, " "Time Magazine."

The Scarlatti Inheritance


Robert Ludlum - 1971
    But his defection entails the release of the ultra-top-secret file on the Scarlatti Inheritance - a file whose contents will destroy many of the Western world's greatest and most illustrious reputations if they are made known...THE SCARLATTI INHERITANCE is a spellbinding story of international terror and intrigue, greed and cunning, suspense and murder.

The Colour Of Lightning


Paulette Jiles - 2009
    But their dreams are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the Johnsons' settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to find his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his beloved and severely damaged Mary enslaved, and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them, the heartsick freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again. A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post-Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history.

Shout at the Devil


Wilbur Smith - 1968
    In SHOUT AT THE DEVIL, the New York Times bestselling master storyteller takes us to a brutal paradise engulfed in the fires of civilization's war...A MAN ON HIS OWNThey couldn't be anymore different: an earnest young Englishman named Sebastian Oldsmith and an Irish American adventurer named Flynn O'Flynn who never encounters a rule he doesn't break. Fate brings them together in Zanzibar. A sadistic German turns them into allies, then into warriors.A WOMAN IN LOVEFrom the moment Rosa O'Flynn lays eyes on Sebastian, Rosa finds the man she would love forever—never mind what plans her father has for her. But imperialism is shaking Mozambique, where O'Flynn is the craftiest, fiercest beast in the jungle. And when Rosa and Sebastian lose what is most precious, they join a band of rogues, natives, wanderers, and hunters to start their own war against an enemy who has nothing to fear—and everything to lose...A HUNT FOR THE MOST DANGEROUS PREY OF ALLFrom the sound and sight of a charging bull elephant to ships ablaze on the Indian Ocean, this is a full throttle saga of survival—against nature, man, and the devil himself..."Action is Wilbur Smith's game, and he is a master."—The Washington Post Book World "[Wilbur Smith] puts the reader right there with details that are intimate, inspiring, horrifying…. Fans will be happy to know Smith hasn't lost his touch for the dramatic, exotic adventure story."— The Orlando Sentinel

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free


Andrew Miller - 2018
    He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain's disastrous campaign against Napoleon's forces in Spain.Gradually Lacroix recovers his health, but not his peace of mind - he cannot talk about the war or face the memory of what happened in a village on the gruelling retreat to Corunna. After the command comes to return to his regiment, he sets out instead for the Hebrides, with the vague intent of reviving his musical interests and collecting local folksongs.Lacroix sails north incognito, unaware that he has far worse to fear than being dragged back to the army: a vicious English corporal and a Spanish officer are on his trail, with orders to kill. The haven he finds on a remote island with a family of free-thinkers and the sister he falls for are not safe, at all.

Clementine


Cherie Priest - 2010
    Exiled, widowed, and on the brink of poverty…she reluctantly goes to work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago.Adding insult to injury, her first big assignment is commissioned by the Union Army. In short, a federally sponsored transport dirigible is being violently pursued across the Rockies and Uncle Sam isn’t pleased. The Clementine is carrying a top secret load of military essentials—essentials which must be delivered to Louisville, Kentucky, without delay.Intelligence suggests that the unrelenting pursuer is a runaway slave who’s been wanted by authorities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon for fifteen years. In that time, Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey has felonied his way back and forth across the continent, leaving a trail of broken banks, stolen war machines, and illegally distributed weaponry from sea to shining sea.And now it’s Maria’s job to go get him.He’s dangerous quarry and she’s a dangerous woman, but when forces conspire against them both, they take a chance and form an alliance. She joins his crew, and he uses her connections. She follows his orders. He takes her advice.And somebody, somewhere, is going to rue the day he crossed either one of them.

Ancient Evenings


Norman Mailer - 1983
    Crossing three millennia to Pharaonic Egypt, this tale returns to that land's essences - the war, magic, gods, death and reincarnations, the lusts, ambitions, jealousies, and betrayals.

The Waterworks


E.L. Doctorow - 1994
    While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of The New York Times, “a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past.”

The Expendables


Leonard B. Scott - 1991
    This is the story of the men who fought with them -- and the 304 who didn't return.

Grey Souls


Philippe Claudel - 2003
    The location is a small town in Northern France, near V., in the dead of the freezing winter. The war is still being fought in the trenches, within sight and sound of the town, but the men of the town have been spared the slaughter because they are needed in the local factory. One morning a beautiful ten year old girl, one of the three daughters of the innkeeper, is found strangled and dumped in the canal. Suspicion falls on two deserters who are picked up near the town. Their interrogation and sentencing is brutal and swift. Twenty years later, the narrator, a local policeman, puts together what actually happened. On the night the deserters were arrested and interrogated, he was sitting by the bedside of his dying wife. He believes that justice was not done and wants to set the record straight. But the death of the child was not the only crime committed in the town during those weeks. More than one record has to be set straight. Beautiful, like a fairy story almost, frozen in time, this novel has an hypnotic quality.

Congo


Michael Crichton - 1980
    But recently, her behavior has been erratic and her drawings match, with stunning accuracy, the brittle pages of a Portuguese print dating back to 1642 . . . a drawing of an ancient lost city. A new expedition — along with Amy — is sent into the Congo where they enter a secret world, and the only way out may be through a horrifying death …source: michaelcrichton.com

The Green Berets: The Amazing Story of the U. S. Army's Elite Special Forces Unit


Robin Moore - 1965
    Though fictionalized, his work is an eye-opening exposé of the horrors of the Vietnam War and the basis for the hit John Wayne movie of the same title. Taut, fast-paced, and interspersed with unforgettable accounts of combat, Moore's novel features an American major who goes "native" with Montagnard tribesmen, a courageous Vietnamese girl who poses as a rabid anti-American Communist to capture a murderous Viet Cong officer and the unforgettable acts of courage of soldiers in the field.

The Inheritors


Harold Robbins - 1975
    Spanning the years 1955 to 1965, and based on the lives of actual network executives and movie moguls, the novel exposes the sex, power, and politics of mass media. Steve Gaunt is working hard to build his television empire. He's a visionary and a bit of a rebel, making him a hit, both in the ratings and with beautiful women. Sam Benjamin, meanwhile, is building his career through the movies. When they join forces, the partnership has the potential to make them very wealthy and powerful. But it's a dirty business and a rogue industry, and friendships can fall in a heartbeat when money is on the line. In its initial publication, The Inheritors was a timely indictment of an industry on fire. Today, it is a fascinating look back at a time when television was just coming into its own, and how the movie industry dealt with this new threat.

HMS Ulysses


Alistair MacLean - 1955
    Now reissued in a new cover style.The story of men who rose to heroism, and then to something greater, HMS Ulysses takes its place alongside The Caine Mutiny and The Cruel Sea as one of the classic novels of the navy at war.It is the compelling story of Convoy FR77 to Murmansk – a voyage that pushes men to the limits of human endurance, crippled by enemy attack and the bitter cold of the Arctic.