Book picks similar to
Balefire by Ken Goddard


fiction
thriller
mystery
adventure

By the Rivers of Babylon


Nelson DeMille - 1978
    Covered by F-14 fighters, accompanied by security men, the planes carry warriors, pacifists, lovers, enemies, dignatories - and a bomb planted by a terrorist mastermind. Suddenly they're forced to crash-land at an ancient desert site. Here, with only a handful of weapons, the men and women of the peace mission must make a desperate stand against an army of crack Palestinian commandos - while the Israeli authorities desperately attempt a rescue bid. A story of compulsive excitement, rich in personal drama and political tension that must rank as one of the greatest of our times.

The Apocalypse Watch


Robert Ludlum - 1995
    After three years in deep cover, and on the eve of his most spectacular success, Harry Latham has disappeared.Drew Latham, Special Officer for Consular Operations in Paris, is frantic to discover his older brother's fate. But when he receives the sudden good news that Harry has surfaced, gut-twisting doubts arise. Has Harry's cover been blown? And if so, why has the Brotherhood of the Watch let him live?For Harry Latham has emerged with an explosive list: the secret supporters of the movement, among them some of the highest-ranking officials in the United States and its allies, names synonymous with honorable service to their nations. It is a document that could topple governments --- but is it legitimate? Can Drew Latham trust his own brother? The search for the truth about Harry --- and the growing Nazi threat --- will plunge Drew into a labyrinth of deceit and death. And whoever gets out alive holds the fate of the free world in his hands.

Icon


Frederick Forsyth - 1996
    From the master of the novel of international intrigue comes a riveting new book as timely and unsettling as tomorrow's headlines.It is summer 1999 in Russia, a country on the threshold of anarchy.  An interim president sits powerless in Moscow as his nation is wracked by famine and inflation, crime and corruption, and seething hordes of the unemployed roam the streets.For the West, Russia is a basket case.  But for Igor Komarov, one-time army sergeant who has risen to leadership of the right-wing UPF party, the chaos is made to order.  As he waits in the wings for the presidential election of January 2000, his striking voice rings out over the airwaves offering the roiling masses hope at last--not only for law, order, and prosperity, but for restoring the lost greatness of their land.Who is this man with the golden tongue who is so quickly becoming the promise of a Russia reborn?  A document stolen from party headquarters and smuggled to Washington and London sends nightmare chills through those who remember the past, for this Black Manifesto is pure Mein Kampf in a country with frightening parallels to the Germany of the Weimar Republic.Officially the West can do nothing, but in secret a group of elder statesmen sends the only person who can expose the truth about Komarov into the heart of the inferno.  Jason Monk, ex-CIA and "the best damn agent-runner we ever had," had sworn he would never return to Moscow, but one name changes his mind.  Colonel Anatoli Grishin, the KGB officer who tortured and murdered four of Monk's agents after they had been betrayed by Aldrich Ames, is now Komarov's head of security.Monk has a dual mission: to stop Komarov, whatever it takes, and to prepare the way for an icon worthy of the Russian people.  But he has a personal mission as well: to settle the final score with Grishin.  To do this he must stay alive--and the forces allied against him are ruthless, the time frighteningly short....

The Day After Tomorrow


Allan Folsom - 1994
    In the first a doctor has to confront his father's killer, in the second a detective investigates a series of horrific murders, and in the third an international organization devises a masterplan of apocalyptic dimensions.

The Romanov Prophecy


Steve Berry - 2004
    Ten months have passed since Nicholas II’s reign was cut short by revolutionaries. Tonight, the White Army advances on the town where the Tsar and his family are being held captive by the Bolsheviks. Nicholas dares to hope for salvation. Instead, the Romanovs are coldly and methodically executed.Moscow: Present Day. Atlanta lawyer Miles Lord, fluent in Russian and well versed in the country’s history, is thrilled to be in Moscow on the eve of such a momentous event. After the fall of Communism and a succession of weak governments, the Russian people have voted to bring back the monarchy. The new tsar will be chosen from the distant relatives of Nicholas II by a specially appointed commission, and Miles’ job is to perform a background check on the Tsarist candidate favored by a powerful group of Western businessmen. But research quickly becomes the least of Miles’ concerns when he is nearly killed by gunmen on a city plaza.Suddenly Miles is racing across continents, shadowed by nefarious henchmen. At first, his only question is why people are pursuing him. But after a strange conversation with a mysterious Russian, who steers Miles toward the writings of Rasputin, he becomes desperate to know more–most important, what really happened to the family of Russia’s last tsar?His only companion is Akilina Petrov, a Russian circus performer sympathetic to his struggle, and his only guide is a cryptic message from Rasputin that implies that the bloody night of so long ago is not the last chapter in the Romanovs’ story . . . and that someone might even have survived the massacre. The prophecy’s implications are earth-shattering–not only for the future of the tsar and mother Russia, but also for Miles himself.

Storm Front


Richard Castle - 2013
    senator. In a heated race against time, Storm chases Volkov's shadow from Paris, to the lair of a computer genius in Iowa, to the streets of Manhattan, then through a bullet-riddled car chase on the New Jersey Turnpike. In the process, Storm uncovers a plot that could destroy the global economy--unleashing untold chaos--which only he can stop.

The Butcher's Boy


Thomas Perry - 1982
    Back in print by popular demand, this spectacular debut, from a writer of “infernal ingenuity” (The New York Times Book Review), includes a new Introduction by bestselling author Michael Connelly.Murder has always been easy for the Butcher’s Boy—it’s what he was raised to do. But when he kills the senior senator from Colorado and arrives in Las Vegas to pick up his fee, he learns that he has become a liability to his shadowy employers. His actions attract the attention of police specialists who watch the world of organized crime, but though everyone knows that something big is going on, only Elizabeth Waring, a bright young analyst in the Justice Department, works her way closer to the truth, and to the frightening man behind it.

Total Control


David Baldacci - 1996
    A husband she loves. A job at which she excels, and a cherished young daughter. Then, as a plane plummets into the Virginia countryside, everything changes. And suddenly there is no one whom Sidney Archer can trust. Jason Archer is a rising young executive at Triton Global, the world's leading technology conglomerate. Determined to give his family the best of everything, Archer has secretly entered into a deadly game of cat and mouse. He is about to disappear - leaving behind a wife who must sort out his lies from his truths, an aircrash investigation team that wants to know why the plane he was ticketed on suddenly fell from the sky, and a veteran FBI agent who wants to know it all. From Seattle to Washington, D.C., from New Orleans to Maine, the hunt for Jason Archer follows a trail as complex as the world he lived and worked in - a world of enormously powerful computers, a multimillion-dollar takeover deal, titanic financial standoffs, artificial intelligence, and the Internet. With brilliant minds colliding, ruthless men waging battles of intimidation, rainmakers going toe-to-toe with killers, and security specialists making a fortune trying to plug the holes, the startling truth behind Jason Archer's disappearance explodes into a sinister plot with the murder of the country's single most powerful individual. And soon Archer's wife, Sidney, aided by the relentless and sharp-eyed FBI agent Lee Sawyer, will plunge straight into the violence that is leaving behind a trail of dead bodies and shocking, exposed secrets...

Breathless


Dean Koontz - 2009
    That night, through the trees, under the moon, a pair of singular animals will watch Grady's isolated home, waiting to make their approach.  A few miles away, Camillia Rivers, a local veterinarian, begins to unravel the threads of a puzzle that will bring all the forces of a government in peril to her door. At a nearby farm, long-estranged identical twins come together to begin a descent into darkness…In Las Vegas, a specialist in chaos theory probes the boundaries of the unknowable…On a Seattle golf course, two men make matter-of-fact arrangements for murder…Along a highway by the sea, a vagrant scarred by the past begins a trek toward his destiny… In a novel that is at once wholly of our time and timeless, fearless and funny, Dean Koontz takes readers into the moment between one turn of the world and the next, across the border between knowing and mystery. It is a journey that will leave all who take it Breathless.

The Book of Fate


Brad Meltzer - 2006
    None of us knew it was coming."So says Wes Holloway, a young presidential aide, about the day he put Ron Boyle, the chief executive's oldest friend, into the president's limousine. By the trip's end, a crazed assassin would permanently disfigure Wes and kill Boyle. Now, eight years later, Boyle has been spotted alive. Trying to figure out what really happened takes Wes back into disturbing secrets buried in Freemason history, a decade-old presidential crossword puzzle, and a two-hundred-year-old code invented by Thomas Jefferson that conceals secrets worth dying for.

The Sign


Raymond Khoury - 2009
    Like the first two, this new thriller combines gripping contemporary suspense with a high-concept mystery rooted in history, philosophy, religion, and science. And like those novels, it is bound for bestseller lists nationwide. In Antarctica, a scientific expedition drops anchor for a live news feed. As the CNN journalist begins her report, a massive, shimmering sphere of light suddenly appears in the sky, enveloping the ship in luminous white light before disappearing as mysteriously as it arrived, the entire event witnessed by an incredulous world audience.Meanwhile in a dusty bar in Egypt, a dozen men are lazily discussing the state of the world when the brilliant, glowing symbol on the television stops them cold. One man breaks out in a sweat, crosses himself repeatedly, and rushes out of the bar muttering the same phrase over and over again: It can't be.Across the Internet and around the globe, a stunning controversy threatens to consume the world: Has God finally decided to reveal himself? Or is something more sinister at hand? Raymond Khoury/Steve Berry interview STEVE BERRY: Your new thriller, THE SIGN. I'm gonna come right out and say it: I think it's your best one yet. What do you think?RAMOND KHOURY: Tough call. It's my new baby, and much as I adore its elder siblings, it does have that newborn magic to it.STEVE: Trust me, it is. It's also a bit of a departure from your first two books, in that it doesn't have the past-and-present storylines. Knowing how stories kind of take on a life of their own, that wasn't a conscious decision from the get-go, was it?RAYMOND KHOURY: No, it wasn't premeditated. It's just the way the story came out. The whole story happens in the present. It takes place over a few manic days, I think you're familiar with that pacing, right? And it deals with the present, it's about a what if situation that's very today and now, there's a mystery, something to figure out, but there's no throwback to the past, no long lost secret to uncover.STEVE BERRY: It's also very topical. Your editors must be pleased.RAYMOND: I guess it happened that way because the story came out of some very strong feelings I had, feelings about what was going on around the world, in the US and abroad.STEVE: Tell me about that process. Where the story came from.RAYMOND: It's where they all come from, isn't it? That kernel, that one thought or one observation you have that just sticks and triggers a book, the one that bugs you late at night and that you can't shake. This one came to me while watching the news one day, and every item, one after another, it was all bad news. Not just bad, but it was like a lot of people were behaving so insanely in so many places around the world, and, sadly, a lot of it was fuelled by the manipulation or distortion of religious faith.STEVE: By intolerance?RAYMOND: Exactly. Intolerance and closed minds. And it got me thinking. About how divided we are, about how so many people all over the world believe in the absolute infallibility of their faith and how it rules every aspect of their lives, you know what I mean, we're right, everyone else is wrong, that medieval mindset and wondering if anything could ever unite the planet under a single faith.STEVE: One global religion. RAYMOND: Well, imagine if something did happen that convinced everyone that what we had until now, all these different religions that have grown over the last few thousand years, what if something new came along that was so overwhelming that it was impossible to ignore? Would we listen? Would we drop our previous faiths and embrace it?STEVE: But your book's about much more than that. Without wanting to give too much away, it's really a political thriller, isn't it?RAYMOND: It's always so hard to talk about a book without giving too much away.STEVE: It's the fine line we walk.RAYMOND: True. But yes, you're right, it's really about the absolute power something like that would bring, and how it could be abused. Cause above all else, it's a thriller. There's got to be a brilliantly dastardly scheme, right?STEVE: Always. And this one certainly is dastardly. One thing I've noticed, though, in all three of your books so far, they're all, essentially, about the big questions that face us: why we believe, whether or not we have to die. Religion, longevity, life and death, science vs. faith ... Big questions. And in this one, you revisit, though in a completely different way, the power of religion, the good it can bring as well as the bad, something that was also central to The Last Templar. Will this always be your signature genre, books that have a big, central theme at their core?RAYMOND: You asked me earlier about where the story came from. For me, in order to get excited about a book, it has to have a big central theme about how we live at its heart, something I'm interested in exploring. It's got to be about something I care about deeply. That's what drives the story and the characters forward for me. That's what I hope makes the books stand out. That they're not just page-turners, which ain't easy in itself, but that they're also about something. I see it in your books too. A point of view about things, a passion for laying out interesting information about a topic that interests you. Michael Crichton used to do that very successfully. Dan Brown, of course, does it brilliantly. That's what makes the books worth writing, I think.STEVE: And in reading the book, it's clear you still had tons of research to do, even though there isn't a historic mystery to unravel?RAYMOND: Absolutely. Some of it was about history, the monasteries in Egypt, for one. Again, part of the story, organically. Had to be done, and we do love our history, don't we?STEVE: Guilty as charged.RAYMOND: But for this book, I didn't need to do that much of it's nothing like what you did for THE CHARLEMAGNE PURSUIT, for instance. Which I loved, by the way. Particularly since you beat me to using the Voynich Manuscript in a story!STEVE: We do seem to be spookily in sync with our writing as further evidenced by THE SIGN's opening in Antarctica?RAYMOND: I know!STEVE: So tell me, Matt and Gracie. Are we going to see them again?RAYMOND: I don't know. On the one hand, I envy your situation with Cotton Malone, you've got a solid anchor for your books, you're building this great world around him, his son and Stephanie and Henrik and Cassiopeia, who I hope we see again real soon, and it's meaty and it's epic and like the rest of your readers, I'm hooked and I want to know what they do next. You've got that, Lee Child has had it since day one with Reacher, Harlan Coben with Myron Bolitar, the list goes on. Great characters. I'd love to do that one day, but it has to feel right. I wasn't in that frame of mind in my first two books, certainly the world after the end of THE SANCTUARY would be a very different place from the world Mia started out in at the beginning of that book. Tess and Reilly, I could maybe bring back. A lot of fans have asked for that. But with THE SIGN, Iinitely think Matt and Gracie are characters that I could bring back. I'd like to put them through another wringer, and it feels like it would come naturally. But before I do that, I'm writing the next book which introduces a new lead character, so they'll be getting a bit of a breather.STEVE: They sure can use it. Good luck with the book.RAYMOND: Thank you.

Power Down


Ben Coes - 2010
    But there was one factor that the terrorists didn't take into account when they struck the Capitana platform off the coast of Colombia--slaughtering much of the crew and blowing up the platform--and that was the Capitana crew chief Dewey Andreas. Dewey, former Army Ranger and Delta, survives the attack, rescuing as many of his men as possible. But the battle has just begun.While the intelligence and law enforcement agencies scramble to untangle these events and find the people responsible, the mysterious figure of Alexander Fortuna--an agent embedded into the highest levels of American society and business--sets into play the second stage of these long-planned attacks. The only fly in the ointment is Dewey Andreas--who is using all his long-dormant skills to fight his way off the platform, then out of Colombia and back to the U.S., following the trail of terrorists and operatives sent to stop him.Power Down is a gripping, compelling debut thriller from Ben Coes, a powerful new author, an amazing talent certain to join the ranks of the genre's finest writers.

Against All Enemies


Tom Clancy - 2011
    . . against a new kind of threat.Get ready to meet ex-Navy SEAL Max Moore. A terrorist bombing in Pakistan wipes out Max Moore’s entire CIA team. As the only survivor, the former Navy SEAL plunges deeper into the treacherous tribal lands to find the terrorist cell, but what he discovers there leads him to a much darker conspiracy in an unexpected part of the globe—the US/Mexico border.Here a drug war rages between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels. The landscape is strewn with bodies, innocents and drug dealers alike, but is there an even deadlier enemy lurking in background? Into this deadly brew, Moore leads a group of specially selected agents whose daring actions reveal shocking answers and uncover an unholy plan—a strike against the very heart of America.

The President Is Missing


Bill Clinton - 2018
    Enemies are planning an attack of unprecedented scale on America. Uncertainty and fear grip Washington. There are whispers of cyberterror and espionage and a traitor in the cabinet. The President himself becomes a suspect, and then goes missing...Set in real time, over the course of three days, The President Is Missing is one of the most dramatic thrillers in decades. And it could all really happen. The President Is Missing is Bill Clinton and James Patterson's totally authentic and spellbinding thriller.

Subterranean


James Rollins - 1999
    Beneath the ice a hand-picked team of specialist makes its way toward the center of the world. They are not the first to venture into this magnificent subterranean labyrinth. Those they follow did not return.Over the rocks...Across the yawning caverns...beyond the black river...You are not alone. Into the darkness where breathtaking wonders await you-and terrors beyond imagining...Revelations that could change the world-things that should never be disturbed...At the bottom of the earth is the beginning. Keep moving toward a miracle that cannot be, toward a mystery older than time.