Slow Horses


Mick HerronMick Herron - 2010
    London, England: Slough House is where the washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their failed careers. The "slow horses," as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated here. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they all have in common, though, is they all want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there─even if it means having to collaborate with one another.River Cartwright, one such “slow horse,” is bitter about his failure and about his tedious assignment transcribing cell phone conversations. When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself. But is the victim who he first appears to be? And what’s the kidnappers’ connection with a disgraced journalist? As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone has his own agenda.

The Trinity Six


Charles Cumming - 2011
    And people are killing for it… London, 1992. Late one night, Edward Crane, 76, is declared dead at a London hospital. An obituary describes him only as a 'resourceful career diplomat'. But Crane was much more than that – and the circumstances surrounding his death are far from what they seem. Fifteen years later, academic Sam Gaddis needs money. When a journalist friend asks for his help researching a possible sixth member of the notorious Trinity spy ring, Gaddis knows that she's onto a story that could turn his fortunes around. But within hours the journalist is dead, apparently from a heart attack. Taking over her investigation, Gaddis trails a man who claims to know the truth about Edward Crane. Europe still echoes with decades of deadly disinformation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And as Gaddis follows a series of leads across the continent, he approaches a shocking revelation – one which will rock the foundations of politics from London to Moscow…

The List


Mick Herron - 2015
    Death has revealed that deceased had been keeping a secret second bank account—and there’s only ever one reason a spy has a secret second bank account. The question of whether he was a double agent must be resolved, and its answer may undo an entire career’s worth of spy secrets.

Kill Day


Andrew Raymond - 2021
    When a routine operation ends in murder, Grant is tasked with capturing the assassin: rogue MI6 officer Henry Marlow.But as Grant leads the hunt, Marlow’s renegade mission escalates, targeting anyone who could expose his secrets. If Grant wants to stop him, he must uncover a shadowy plot that links a Saudi prince, a corrupt Interpol detective, and an infamous black ops programme.With the very future of MI6 at stake, Grant must confront Marlow in a terrifying endgame – after which nothing will be the same again.The epic journey starts here.

Silverview


John le Carré - 2021
    Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the City for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian's evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems to know a lot about Julian's family and is rather too interested in the inner workings of his modest new enterprise.When a letter turns up at the door of a spy chief in London warning him of a dangerous leak, the investigations lead him to this quiet town by the sea . . .Silverview is the mesmerizing story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. In this last complete masterwork from the greatest chronicler of our age, John le Carré asks what you owe to your country when you no longer recognize it.

Casino Royale


Ian Fleming - 1953
    007, is sent to France to play in a high-stakes baccarat game in an effort to take down Le Chiffre, a financier for the villainous SMERSH. Things get more complicated when he is partnered with Vesper Lynd, a beautiful and smart MI6 employee with a dark secret. Bond is one of the most iconic characters in 20th-century literature. In addition to the 12 novels and 9 short stories written by Ian Fleming, there have been over 40 novels and short stories written about the spy by other authors, and over 25 blockbuster films starring such actors as Sean Connery and Daniel Craig.Here's the first.

Rogue Male


Geoffrey Household - 1939
    An Englishman plans to assassinate the dictator of a European country. But he is foiled at the last moment and falls into the hands of ruthless and inventive torturers. They devise for him an ingenious and diplomatic death but, for once, they bungle the job and he escapes. But England provides no safety from his pursuers - and the Rogue Male must strip away all the trappings of status and civilization as the hunter becomes a hunted animal.

Our Woman in Moscow


Beatriz Williams - 2021
    The world is shocked by the family’s sensational disappearance. Were they eliminated by the Soviet intelligence service? Or have the Digbys defected to Moscow with a trove of the West’s most vital secrets?Four years later, Ruth Macallister receives a postcard from the twin sister she hasn’t seen since their catastrophic parting in Rome in the summer of 1940, as war engulfed the continent and Iris fell desperately in love with an enigmatic United States Embassy official named Sasha Digby. Within days, Ruth is on her way to Moscow, posing as the wife of counterintelligence agent Sumner Fox in a precarious plot to extract the Digbys from behind the Iron Curtain.But the complex truth behind Iris’s marriage defies Ruth’s understanding, and as the sisters race toward safety, a dogged Soviet KGB officer forces them to make a heartbreaking choice between two irreconcilable loyalties.

Angelmaker


Nick Harkaway - 2012
    The son of infamous London criminal Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, he has turned his back on his family’s mobster history and aims to live a quiet life. That orderly existence is suddenly upended when Joe activates a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism. His client, Edie Banister, is more than the kindly old lady she appears to be—she’s a retired international secret agent. And the device? It’s a 1950s doomsday machine. Having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the British government and a diabolical South Asian dictator who is also Edie’s old arch-nemesis. On the upside, Joe’s got a girl: a bold receptionist named Polly whose smarts, savvy and sex appeal may be just what he needs. With Joe’s once-quiet world suddenly overrun by mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realizes that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight, help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago and pick up his father’s old gun...

Beyond A Reasonable Doubt


Linda S. Prather - 2015
    Her job isn’t easy, but it has always been black and white—criminals versus victims. Now she is the victim, and the very system she’s fought to uphold is suddenly corrupt, the lines between good and bad are blurred and her world has turned upside down. She’s always known that world existed—a world of power so immense that a single phone call can result in people disappearing or political offices being vacated, a world where doctors are available at a moment’s notice. She’s never been part of that world—never wanted to be. The body count is rising, and unless she finds proof beyond a reasonable doubt against a corrupt former federal judge, and a notorious criminal defense attorney, it will continue to rise.

JET - Ops Files II: Terror Alert


Russell Blake - 2015
     From a NY Times and USA Today bestselling author.

Restless


William Boyd - 2006
    Sally Gilmartin is a respectable English widow living in picturesque Cotswold village; Eva Delectorskaya was a rigorously trained World War II spy, a woman who carried fake passports and retreated to secret safe houses, a woman taught to lie and deceive, and above all, to never trust anyone.Three decades later the secrets of Sally’s past still haunt her. Someone is trying to kill her and at last she has decided to trust Ruth with her story. Ruth, meanwhile, is struggling to make sense of her own life as a young single mother with an unfinished graduate degree and escalating dependence on alcohol. She is drawn deeper and deeper into the astonishing events of her mother’s past—the mysterious death of Eva’s beloved brother, her work in New York City manipulating the press in order to shift public sentiment toward American involvement in the war, and her dangerous romantic entanglement. Now Sally wants to find the man who recruited her for the secret service, and she needs Ruth’s help.Restless is a brilliant espionage book and a vivid portrait of the life of a female spy. Full of tension and drama, and based on a remarkable chapter of Anglo-American history, this is fiction at its finest.

The Ipcress File


Len Deighton - 1962
    Len Deighton’s classic first novel, whose protagonist is a nameless spy – later christened Harry Palmer and made famous worldwide in the iconic 1960s film starring Michael Caine.The Ipcress File was not only Len Deighton’s first novel, it was his first bestseller and the book that broke the mould of thriller writing.For the working class narrator, an apparently straightforward mission to find a missing biochemist becomes a journey to the heart of a dark and deadly conspiracy.The film of The Ipcress File gave Michael Caine one of his first and still most celebrated starring roles, while the novel itself has become a classic.

Wrong Town: A Mark Landry Novel


Randall H. Miller - 2015
    It's that good." - Colonel D. Paquin, U.S. Army 10th Mountain Division An Amazon Best Seller in the U.S., U.K., Canada, & Australia! Wrong Town fuses the worlds of special operations, counterintelligence, police work, and small-town drama into a gripping adventure full of characters with monumental responsibilities and real-life troubles. Follow thirty-nine-year-old veteran Mark Landry as he returns home, having retired from an American government black-ops unit. In a small town north of Boston with a rich history, Landry finds that the only girl he has ever loved, Luci Alvarez, is now an extraordinary policewoman at the precarious center of a community’s struggles with change, amidst a powder keg of fear and paranoia not seen since colonial times. Landry seeks to convince Officer Alvarez that he is home for good as he learns the astonishing answer to a lifelong mystery. Landry is eager to begin his new life, but events threaten to expose disturbing details of his past that would send shockwaves through the country and sabotage the only relationship he cares about. As terrorist attacks and targeted mass shootings increasingly litter American soil, two new realities come into focus: the war on terrorism’s geographic center of gravity is shifting, and Landry’s new life is beginning to look a lot like the career he left behind.

The Girl in the Spider's Web: by David Lagercrantz | Recap and Analysis


Instarecap - 2015
    It brings back two memorable characters from the blockbuster trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson; “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, “The Girl Who Played with Fire”, and, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” . Like the three books, “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” is translated from the original Swedish language, and most of the action happens in and around Stockholm. Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant anti-social hacker once again teams up with Michael Blomkvist, a relentless reporter, to help infiltrate a murderous technology organization with links to powerful corporations, law enforcement agencies, and nothing less than the the United States’ National Security Administration, or NSA. There appears to be a distinct difference in storytelling between the three Larsson books and Lagercrantz’s Spider, which can be attributed to the subject matter on hand or the writer’s style, and maybe even both. Larsson seemed to let events unfold slowly, since he did, after all, have three books to gradually introduce us to, and develop, the characters especially Lisbeth Salander. Some critics decry Lagercrantz’ narrative as fragmentary and confusing, with dozens of characters in a wide array of backgrounds: journalists, spies, hackers, law enforcement officers, scientists and of course killers, who at times seem to briefly emerge, vanish, and then turn up again. Then there is the sometimes arcane language of hacking, cryptography, physics, and artificial intelligence, where there are complicated moments when the characters discuss such prime-number factorization (PNF), self-teaching algorithms, singularity theory, black holes, prime-number factorization and black holes. Many of the characters are indeed geniuses and Lagercrantz mostly succeeds in allowing the science to be decipherable. The original trilogy’s anti-heroine, Lisbeth Salander, isn’t much seen in the first half of the book, but is quickly inserted into the action, and of course, turns into the main focus of events. Most of the characters from the original trilogy show up in the book, including the shadow of Lisbeth’s horrendous dead father, Zalachenko, and the traitorous Hans Faste. Two new compelling characters are introduced: Camilla Salander/Zalachenko, Lisbeth’s evil twin, and 8-year old August Balder, and autistic savant and mathematical genius, who shares most of the spotlight with Salander. The action is fast paced and the characters, many, and like the first three Larsson novels, may be a tough read to put down. Read more.... Download your copy today! for a limited time discount of only $2.99! Available on PC, Mac, smart phone, tablet or Kindle device. © 2015 All Rights Reserved by Unlimited Press Works, LLC