Book picks similar to
Choke Hold by Warren Murphy


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the-destroyer
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The Protocol


J. Robert Kennedy - 2010
    Descendent from the Roman Empire, they pervade every level of society, and are now in a race with our own government to retrieve an ancient artifact thought to have been lost forever.Caught in the middle is archaeology professor James Acton, relentlessly hunted by the elite Delta Force, under orders to stop at nothing to possess what he has found, and the Triarii, equally determined to prevent the discovery from falling into the wrong hands.With his students and friends dying around him, Acton flees to find the one person who might be able to help him, but little does he know he may actually be racing directly into the hands of an organization he knows nothing about…

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.

Spore


David Kristoph - 2020
    Intrusive thoughts begin invading John's mind. And the swirling blue liquid injected into their veins each night does not seem like part of any legitimate study.As the true motive for the research facility is revealed, John's focus shifts from his crippling insomnia to his own horrific imprisonment. Can he and his fellow subjects escape the facility alive, or are they doomed like all the test subjects before them?

Fault Line


Barry Eisler - 2009
    But then the inventor of a technology Alex is banking on is murdered... and the patent examiner who reviewed it dies... and Alex himself narrowly escapes an attack in his own home. Off balance, out of ideas, and running out of time, he knows the one person who can help him is the last person he'd ever ask: his brother.Ben Treven is a Military Liaison Element, an elite undercover soldier paid to "find, fix, and finish" high-value targets in America's Global War on Terror. Disenchanted with what he sees as America's culture of denial and decadence, Ben lives his detached life in the shadows because the black ops world is all he really knows--and because other than Alex, who he hasn't spoken to since their mother died, his family is long gone.But blood is thicker than water, and when he receives Alex's frantic call, Ben hurries to San Francisco to help him. Only then does Alex reveal that there's another player who knows of the technology: Sarah Hosseini, a young Iranian American lawyer who Alex has long secretly desired... and who Ben immediately distrusts. As these three radically different people struggle to identify the forces attempting to silence them, Ben and Alex are forced to examine the events that drove them apart--even as Sarah's presence, and her own secret wants, deepens the fault line between them.Emotionally charged and politically timely, Fault Line centers on a conspiracy that has spun out of the shadows and into the streets of America, a conspiracy that can be stopped only by three people--three people with different worldviews, different grievances, different motives. To survive the forces arrayed against them, they'll first have to survive each other.

The Prince


Jillian Dodd - 2016
    Fans of The Selection and The Hunger Games will discover a heart-pounding thrill ride of espionage and suspense set in glittering high society.An eighteen-year-old covert agent is pulled out of training before graduation by Black X, a espionage group so secret even the President of the United States doesn't know it exists.For her first mission, she must go undercover as the long-lost daughter of a recently deceased billionaire, infiltrate high society, and protect the Prince of Montrovia from assassination. But Prince Lorenzo is known as the Playboy Prince for a reason and his sensuality and charisma add a whole other level of complication to her mission. She knows that her every move is being watched, but what she doesn’t know is that the Prince is just a chess piece in a bigger game that will have world-wide ramifications. And that Blackwood Academy, the place she has called home for the past six years has secrets of its own.

Cosega Search


Brandt Legg - 2014
    What he finds is beyond imagining. It unleashes a mystery older than recorded time, rewrites human history, and promises to change the planet’s future. It must be suppressed.The most powerful forces in the world align against him, and a deadly competition for the artifact ensues. Capturing Gaines is not enough--everyone who has seen the artifact must be killed. His only hope is to stay alive long enough to decode the Cosega Sequence. Dig far enough into the past . . . you may just discover the future.

The Living Shadow


Walter B. Gibson - 1931
    But no one knows THE SHADOW. Cloaked in darkness and mystery, the man in black is a legend to those who have felt his remorseless hand: The Underworld. One step outside the law and many leagues ahead of the police in the battle against crime, he haunts the forbidding canyons of Manhattan with a mocking laugh that strikes terror into the souls of the guilty everywhere.With his invisible network of crimefighters who have pledged him their loyalty--and their lives, THE SHADOW stalks a trial of blood that begins with a strange Chinese coin and ends with a king's ransom in jewels. A fortune leading straight into the trap of a brilliant master criminal who has just pulled the job of a lifetime--in another man's skin! Has THE SHADOW met his match at last?(Originally published in The Shadow Magazine, Volume I, April/June 1931.)

One by One


Robert Enright - 2015
    Daily Muay Thai training sessions with his best friend, a progressive career as a mechanic and married to Helen, the love of his life. All of it comes to an end on a rainy saturday night in London. When Helen is ripped from the world by the notorious Drayton family on a visit to the capital and the police, including the prodigal Officer Starling, do little to bring them to justice, Lucas embarks on a rain soaked London to put things right himself. As the body count rises and the ripple effects of the escalating violence reaches further than he could have imagined, Lucas has to confront his dark past, his continuous grief, a nationwide police hunt and, of course, the Draytons.... One by One. A riveting story of revenge and redemption with hard-hitting action and heart-wrenching grief, One by One is a must for fans of Crime Thrillers.

No Other Option


Marcus Wynne - 2001
    A trail of bodies left in his wake. He was once America's best. A member of Project Dominance Rain, an elite cauldron of the cream of America's military and intelligence community, his betrayal has brought dishonor to his team, and now they must send in the one man who knew Maxwell best, Master Sergeant Dale Miller. They fought side by side. They watched each other's back in the world's hot spots. Maxwell and Miller know each other's tactics, they know each other's mind, and they both understand their mission: kill or be killed.

Matt Helm: The War Years


Keith Wease - 2013
    He is the star of 27 novels written by Donald Hamilton from 1960 through the 1990s. Although a cold-blooded killer, Matt Helm has a superb sense of humor, a sharp opinion on just about everything, and is quite capable of falling in love (or lust) during his missions. This book is about his WWII experiences, from his initial recruitment into the agency, his training, and his missions during the war.This book is a pastiche authorized by Donald Hamilton's son, Gordon Hamilton.

Siege of Silence


A.J. Quinnell - 1986
    The American ambassador is held prisoner. And the US President faces the choice: get him out ... or kill him. In as rat-infested room ambassador Peabody faces a brilliant, ruthless young protege of Fidel Castro, Jorge Calderon, who is determined to extract the truth behind a secret CIA operation against Cuba. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the President is caught between CIA strategists who want to eliminate Peabody before he can reveal the CIA's plans, and Colonel Silas Slocum, the one man who believes he can rescue the ambassador in an awesome and daring rescue...

Sandstorm


James Rollins - 2004
    And now the search for answers is leading Lady Kara Kensington; her friend Safia al-Maaz, the gallery's brilliant and beautiful curator; and their guide, the international adventurer Omaha Dunn, into a world they never dreamed existed: a lost city buried beneath the Arabian desert. But others are being drawn there as well, some with dark and sinister purposes. And the many perils of a death-defying trek deep into the savage heart of the Arabian Peninsula pale before the nightmare waiting to be unearthed at journey's end: an ageless and awesome power that could create a utopia... or destroy everything humankind has built over countless millennia.

Luna


Garon Whited - 2007
    It's not as bad as we thought. From the very first line, "Luna" grabs the reader. Where most books start with a world in trouble and ride the story on into a happy ending or to the ultimate destruction, "Luna" starts with the end of the world. Things can only get better, right? With the world destroyed, the story centers on six survivors in the first lunar shuttle, on their way to shake down and tune up a robot-built underground tunnel complex on the Moon. They have to face a number of issues, not the least of which is the self-destruction of their homeworld and the survival of the species. Fortunately, any culture advanced enough to have a lunar colony and the capability to destroy its own civilization is likely to have people who are not on the planet at any given time. From these few survivors, the human race will have to either survive and grow, or wither away into nothing. They have to face many difficulties, ranging from purely scientific ones such as genetics, mechanics, chemistry, and nutrition, to the more complex difficulties of human nature, such as love, sex, and loneliness. The conflict between politics and military command also rears its ugly head, with uncertain results, aside from the obvious: War. Told from the point of view of Max, the officer in charge of the mechanical aspects of the lunar base, "Luna" takes us on a fast-paced tour of our own Moon, the LaGrange points, a number of habitable satellites, as well as the light and dark places in the human soul. Any science fiction reader will delight in the near-future possibilities of lunar colonization, along with the superb character development, snappy dialogue, and the dry humor that are so characteristic of Garon Whited's work.A gripping page-turner, Whited's "Luna" is more than a little reminiscent of Robert Heinlein, mixed with a dash of E.E. "Doc" Smith, and stirred with a sardonic sense of humor uniquely his own. Fans of Garon Whited's "Nightlord: Sunset" will want to add this one to the collection!

Red Sparrow Trilogy eBook Boxed Set (The Red Sparrow Trilogy)


Jason Matthews - 2018
    Forced to become a “Sparrow”—a spy trained in the art of seduction to elicit information from unsuspecting marks—she’s been assigned to Nathaniel Nash, a CIA officer who handles the organization’s most sensitive Russian intelligence. The action in The Red Sparrow Trilogy careens between Russia, France, Hong Kong, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and the United States as these two young intelligence officers, trained in their respective spy schools, collide in a charged atmosphere of deception and a forbidden spiral of carnal attraction that threatens both their careers and consumes intelligence agencies from Moscow to the highest offices in the US government. In each book they confront not only the shadows and intrigues of the Russian and American intelligence networks but highly trained, cold-blooded killers assigned to destroy them. With a plot ripped from tomorrow’s headlines, and written with sophisticated brio, The Red Sparrow Trilogy has been hailed as a monumental accomplishment “as suspenseful and cinematic as the best spy movies” (The Philadelphia Inquirer); “fans of the genre’s masters including John le Carré and Ian Fleming will happily embrace Matthews’s central spy” (USA TODAY). Collected together, the three novels form a stunning masterwork of suspense, intrigue, sex, and violence.

ZAP Agent Mathis


C.R. Daems - 2015
    Of course it did fit a pattern of not being able to decide what she wanted to do with her life since grammar school. In college she had tried a variety of subjects, played sports, and partied, excelling at each, but she had graduated as undecided as she had been in grammar school. And the Ad, interview, and current speaker made the training sound like hard work and the job dangerous. But they had dangled two worms in front of her: the chance to see the lives of the rich and powerful up close and to protect important people. And she could quit if she decided it wasn’t what she was looking for—whatever that was. To everyone’s astonishment, can't-make-up-her-mind and party-girl Kate Mathis survives the training, makes agent, enjoys her job, and finds something she loves—outmaneuvering the terrorists.