Book picks similar to
The Contract Man by A.P. Bateman
fiction
a-p-bateman
new-authors
gimme
The Russian Renaissance
Ian Kharitonov - 2010
Constantine can no longer hide in Europe. As he discovers a century-old secret, he must flee back to Moscow, chased by assassins. Only one man can save him. Eugene Sokolov: an officer in the world's most elite rescue unit, a martial arts legend… and Constantine's brother. They face an enemy unlike any other. In a game run by a KGB spymaster, the fate of Russia will depend on their survival.
A Family Reunion
Rod Pennington - 2011
The ensuing scandal created a firestorm in Washington which required a high profile scapegoat. To protect his team, Charon cut a deal. Instead of embarrassing The Company by pointing fingers or naming names, he fell on his own sword. After a seven-year self-imposed exile, when he traveled throughout the Far East, Charon resurfaced in Washington. With unexplained but seemingly unlimited funding, he set up an ultra-high-end boutique security firm. With a knack for getting results in impossible situations and a history of keeping his mouth shut, the services of Sariel International were soon much in demand by the rich and the powerful of the world.Charon’s life is turned upside down when a beautiful but mysterious young woman appears unannounced at his office. He soon learns that members of his old Water Works team have come out of retirement and for unknown reasons are killing each other.When he follows the trail, he discovers the identity of the person who had leaked the story years earlier and the startling reason why.
Brilliance
Marcus Sakey - 2013
In New York, a man sensing patterns in the stock market racks up $300 billion. In Chicago, a woman can go invisible by being where no one is looking. They’re called "brilliants," and since 1980, one percent of people have been born this way. Nick Cooper is among them; a federal agent, Cooper has gifts rendering him exceptional at hunting terrorists. His latest target may be the most dangerous man alive, a brilliant drenched in blood and intent on provoking civil war. But to catch him, Cooper will have to violate everything he believes in - and betray his own kind.From Marcus Sakey, "a modern master of suspense" (Chicago Sun-Times) and "one of our best storytellers" (Michael Connelly), comes an adventure that’s at once breakneck thriller and shrewd social commentary; a gripping tale of a world fundamentally different and yet horrifyingly similar to our own, where being born gifted can be a terrible curse.
The Abominable
Dan Simmons - 2013
Everest. By the following year, three climbers -- a British poet and veteran of the Great War, a young French Chamonix guide, and an idealistic young American -- find a way to take their shot at the top. They arrange funding from the grieving Lady Bromley, whose son also disappeared on Mt. Everest in 1924. Young Bromley must be dead, but his mother refuses to believe it and pays the trio to bring him home.Deep in Tibet and high on Everest, the three climbers -- joined by the missing boy's female cousin -- find themselves being pursued through the night by someone . . . or something. This nightmare becomes a matter of life and death at 28,000 feet -- but what is pursuing them? And what is the truth behind the 1924 disappearances on Everest? As they fight their way to the top of the world, the friends uncover a secret far more abominable than any mythical creature could ever be. A pulse-pounding story of adventure and suspense, The Abominable is Dan Simmons at his spine-chilling best.
No Middle Name
Lee Child - 2017
This is the first time all Lee Child's shorter fiction featuring Jack Reacher has been collected into one volume.A brand-new novella, Too Much Time, is included, as are those previously only published in ebook form: Second Son, James Penney's New Identity, Guy Walks Into a Bar, Deep Down, High Heat, Not a Drill and Small Wars. Added to these is every other Reacher short story that Child has written: Everyone Talks, Maybe They Have a Tradition, No Room at the Motel and The Picture of the Lonely Diner. Read together, these twelve stories shed new light on Reacher’s past, illuminating how he grew up and developed into the wandering avenger who has captured the imagination of millions around the world.
Inception
Steven Konkoly - 2018
Petrovich is none of those things, which makes him all the more dangerous. Unlike most "heroes," there's no obvious black and white in Petrovich's world. He sees everything in gray — an uncompromising trait that will keep him alive long enough to pull off one of the biggest coups in covert military history.INCEPTION is Daniel Petrovich's origin story. The perfect place for a new reader to start the BLACK FLAGGED series.
The Dig
Michael Siemsen - 2010
Mystified experts, confounded by the impossible timeline they receive from traditional dating methods, call upon a stubborn twenty-something with a unique talent. Matthew Turner's gift is also his curse: whenever he touches an object, his consciousness is flooded with the thoughts and feelings of those who touched it before him, be it last week or centuries ago. It's a talent that many covet, some fear, and almost no one understands. Despite being exploited as a child and tormented by the unpleasant experiences imprinted on him from the various items he's "read," Matt agrees to travel from New York to the forests of Kenya. There, threatened by unknown enemies, and helped by a beautiful but prickly ally who begins to understand his strange ability, his mind journeys back in geological time to make a discovery so shocking that it forces us to rewrite all human history.
The Girl Beneath the Sea
Andrew Mayne - 2020
An auxiliary officer for Lauderdale Shores PD, she’s the go-to diver for evidence recovery. Then Sloan finds a fresh kill floating in a canal—a woman whose murky history collides with Sloan’s. Their troubling ties are making Sloan less a potential witness than a suspect. And her colleagues aren’t the only ones following every move she makes. So is the killer.Stalked by an assassin, pitted against a ruthless cartel searching for a lost fortune, and under watch within her ranks, Sloan has only one ally: the legendary DEA agent who put Sloan’s uncle behind bars. He knows just how deep corruption runs—and the kind of danger Sloan is in. To stay alive, Sloan must stay one step ahead of her enemies—both known and unknown—and a growing conspiracy designed to pull her under.
Trigger Point
Andy Maslen - 2015
Ex-SAS and haunted by the ghosts of his fallen comrades. He left the army with a chest full of medals and PTSD. Now he faces the toughest challenge of his life. Preventing a hostile coup in the UK. He's recruited by Britta Falskog, a former member of Swedish Special Forces now working for MI5. There used to be something between them, but it's all business now. Read Book One - Trigger Point - now Sir Toby Maitland claims to be standing for Parliament. But his ultra-nationalist rhetoric is more than just a vote-grabber. Set up by MI5, he hires Gabriel as a spokesman/enforcer. Working undercover, Gabriel travels to the US with Maitland. His brief, discover Maitland's plan and then stop him. With deadly force. He gets embroiled in a drugs-for-cash deal with Hells Angels. Then must convince Maitland where his loyalties lie, on a farm in Michigan run as an arms depot by an ex-South African security service operator. With the Prime Minister due to overfly Maitland’s estate en route to a military conference, and a paramilitary force gathered in preparation for a coup, time is running out for Wolfe. As the action swings from the English countryside to Chicago, upstate Michigan and back again, expect plenty of kinetic action in calibres from 5.56mm up to the mighty "fifty cal". Plus martial arts, knife-fights and car chases. Wolfe may be learning the ways of spooks, but his military skills are still razor-sharp. As he gathers intel along the way he teams up with an ex-Delta Force operator, Shaun Cunningham. The two men bond over shared experiences in service until a horrifying development smashes the partnership. It all starts here Trigger Point is the first novel in this series of all-action thrillers. It follows Wolfe from the SAS into the murky shadows of covert assassination ops for The Department. Other books in the series see him combat Chechen terrorists, a death cult in the rainforest, political corruption and Russian crime gangs. But first there's a planned coup in the UK and Gabriel is tasked with killing its leader. DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY OF TRIGGER POINT NOW
Shadow Soldiers
Jim Heskett - 2018
A quick and clean assassin. But he's burned out and ready to quit.Trained by a government agency with no name, Layne Parrish can snap a neck with one hand. But tea parties and cartoons with his three-year-old daughter is where his priorities are. After retiring to the mountains of Colorado for a simpler life, Layne thought that perilous world was behind him.He was wrong--dead wrong.When his former boss begs for his expertise, Layne knows he has one mission: Eliminate an assassin to save a life. It's a job he can't refuse. This particular assassin is a ghost from his past--a murky past he wants destroyed. But when Layne picks up his pistol for the last time, will his plan backfire?
The Mullah's Storm
Tom Young - 2010
The storm makes rescue impossible, and for two people—navigator Michael Parson and a woman Army interpreter, Sergeant Gold—a battle for survival begins across some of the most forbidding terrain on earth against not only the hazards of nature, but the treacheries of man: the Taliban stalking them; the villagers, whose loyalty is unknown; and a prisoner who would very much like the three of them to be caught. All Parson and Gold have is each other, to stay alive.“When you write fiction, your best work may come from what scares you the most,” writes airman Thomas W. Young. “When I first flew to Afghanistan, what scared me the most wasn’t the thought of getting shot down and killed. It was the thought of getting shot down and not killed. . . .”
The Templar Legacy
Steve Berry - 2006
. . until the Inquisition, when they were wiped from the face of the earth, their hidden riches lost. But now two forces vying for the treasure have learned that it is not at all what they thought it was–and its true nature could change the modern world.Cotton Malone, one-time top operative for the U.S. Justice Department, is enjoying his quiet new life as an antiquarian book dealer in Copenhagen when an unexpected call to action reawakens his hair-trigger instincts–and plunges him back into the cloak-and-dagger world he thought he’d left behind.It begins with a violent robbery attempt on Cotton’s former supervisor, Stephanie Nelle, who’s far from home on a mission that has nothing to do with national security. Armed with vital clues to a series of centuries-old puzzles scattered across Europe, she means to crack a mystery that has tantalized scholars and fortune-hunters through the ages by finding the legendary cache of wealth and forbidden knowledge thought to have been lost forever when the order of the Knights Templar was exterminated in the fourteenth century. But she’s not alone. Competing for the historic prize–and desperate for the crucial information Stephanie possesses–is Raymond de Roquefort, a shadowy zealot with an army of assassins at his command.Welcome or not, Cotton seeks to even the odds in the perilous race. But the more he learns about the ancient conspiracy surrounding the Knights Templar, the more he realizes that even more than lives are at stake. At the end of a lethal game of conquest, rife with intrigue, treachery, and craven lust for power, lies a shattering discovery that could rock the civilized world–and, in the wrong hands, bring it to its knees.
Red Sparrow
Jason Matthews - 2013
In present-day Russia, ruled by blue-eyed, unblinking President Vladimir Putin, Russian intelligence officer Dominika Egorova struggles to survive in the post-Soviet intelligence jungle. Ordered against her will to become a “Sparrow,” a trained seductress, Dominika is assigned to operate against Nathaniel Nash, a young CIA officer who handles the Agency’s most important Russian mole.Spies have long relied on the “honey trap,” whereby vulnerable men and women are intimately compromised. Dominika learns these techniques of “sexpionage” in Russia’s secret “Sparrow School,” hidden outside of Moscow. As the action careens between Russia, Finland, Greece, Italy, and the United States, Dominika and Nate soon collide in a duel of wills, tradecraft, and—inevitably—forbidden passion that threatens not just their lives but those of others as well. As secret allegiances are made and broken, Dominika and Nate’s game reaches a deadly crossroads. Soon one of them begins a dangerous double existence in a life-and-death operation that consumes intelligence agencies from Moscow to Washington, DC.Page by page, veteran CIA officer Jason Matthews’s Red Sparrow delights and terrifies and fascinates, all while delivering an unforgettable cast, from a sadistic Spetsnaz “mechanic” who carries out Putin’s murderous schemes to the weary CIA Station Chief who resists Washington “cake-eaters” to MARBLE, the priceless Russian mole. Packed with insider detail and written with brio, this tour-de-force novel brims with Matthews’s life experience, including his knowledge of espionage, counterintelligence, surveillance tradecraft, spy recruitment, cyber-warfare, the Russian use of “spy dust,” and covert communications. Brilliantly composed and elegantly constructed, Red Sparrow is a masterful spy tale lifted from the dossiers of intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Authentic, tense, and entertaining, this novel introduces Jason Matthews as a major new American talent.
A Talent for Killing
Ralph Dennis - 2019
Every line is razor sharp and without an ounce of fat. Jason Bourne fans will find a lot to like." Publishers Weekly Kane was a top CIA assassin until he suffered traumatic physical and psychological injuries in a mission that went horribly wrong. The Agency wiped his memory, gave him a new identity, and retired him to a life of mundane, anonymous domesticity. But his training, and his talent for killing, came back with a vengeance. He created a new life for himself as a killer-for-hire, righting wrongs for people who can't find peace or justice any other way. He doesn't know that his memories are fiction, or that he is always being watched, or that he's been targeted for death by a rogue faction within the Agency. A TALENT FOR KILLING In this brutal, fast-moving thriller from Ralph Dennis, the author of the legendary Hardman series of crime novels, Kane finds himself caught between the mob, Cuban revolutionaries, and his own government as he seeks retribution for a man murdered for uncovering small-town corruption...and justice for another man on death row, falsely convicted of raping and murdering a child. Praise for Ralph Dennis "There are times when Dennis' writing touches on the inspired. He knew how to ride the zeitgeist....if not get ahead of the game. A TALENT FOR KILLING is a really exhilarating action thriller that springs a couple of surprises." NB Magazine UK "Like Chandler and Hammett before him, Dennis was trying to do something different with what was thought of as throwaway literature." Joe R. Lansdale "Ralph Dennis has mastered the genre and supplied top entertainment." New York Times "Exceptional characterization, strong and vigorous prose." Mystery Scene Magazine A portion of this book was previously published in 1976 under the title Deadman's Game
Yellowstone Hellfire
Bobby Akart - 2015
Its beauty is breathless and tranquil. Crystal clear streams flow. Buffalo roam freely. It's what's happening beneath that will bring HELLFIRE! The Yellowstone Series, a new disaster thriller from critically acclaimed author, Bobby Akart, takes the reader on a thrill ride as a cataclysmic event of extinction level proportions ticks away like a time bomb, awaiting its moment. Millions of people visit the Yellowstone National Park every year blissfully unaware they are on top of the greatest killer man has ever known - the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Beneath this primal allure simmers a catastrophic threat. A caldera the size of Mount Everest, created hundreds of thousand of years ago, which holds back super-heated magma, rising and falling, looking for release. Scientists agree, the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano is long overdue. Events have been set into motion that lit the fuse of the greatest disaster mankind has ever known. Is it going to happen? Yes. Do we know when? Anytime, or not within our lifetime, hopefully. But if it does ... The eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano will be more than a spectacle to grab our attention. It will be the end of the world as we know it.
ABOUT THE YELLOWSTONE SERIES
Volcanoes are the Earth's way of letting off steam. While most people look at volcanic eruptions as natural disasters, the fact of the matter is, without them, the Earth would explode. Deep beneath the surface of the planet, excess heat builds up, finding a way to vent. Like an overcrowded bus on a hot summer day, the overheated magma stews in its own madness, allowing pent-up frustrations to boil over, until it releases its fury - its HELLFIRE - upon the world above. Yellowstone is the most potentially explosive, violent, deadly, active volcano on our planet and scientists agree, a catastrophic eruption is inevitable. Yellowstone is extraordinary in its potential and is quite simply, Earth's greatest killer. You've been warned.