Book picks similar to
Beyond Ultra by Robert A. Wright


espionage
historical-fiction
ai-up-next-reads
political-historical

Collision of Evil: A Franz Waldbaer Thriller


John J. Le Beau - 2009
    In the peace, quiet and pastoral splendor of this magnificent setting, Charles Hirter draws his last breath. Was Charles simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?Kommissar Franz Waldbaer, the German detective in charge of the case, faces an investigation that yields neither clues nor suspects nor motives. A gruff, go-it alone detective, Waldbaer is dismayed by the arrival of Robert Hirter, the victim's brother, who insists on joining the investigation. But there is more to Robert than meets the eye.As Robert and the Kommissar uncover a nefarious nexus of evil past and evil present, they find themselves probing dark, long-forgotten episodes from the Third Reich in order to identify the present threat.Thrust into a violent world of fanatic passions, malevolent intentions and excruciating urgency, Robert Hirter and Kommissar Waldbaer must race against the clock to stop a sophisticated, covert, and deadly plot.

After the Execution


James Raven - 2012
    He's lost everything - his wife, his dreams, his future. He finally enters the death chamber at the famous 'Walls' prison in Texas. He's strapped to a gurney and given an injection of lethal drugs in front of witnesses. Minutes later he's pronounced dead. But that's not the end of it. After the execution comes the shocking revelation - Jordan is still alive. And to stop him talking he has to die all over again - before he brings down the entire American justice system.

Mark of Cain


Marcus Hünnebeck - 2014
    But when a disturbing pattern in recent cases begins to emerge, he chooses to postpone his self-imposed retirement in order to help out an old flame.Detective Katharina Rosenberg has a new case and a new cop killer on the run. When two colleagues are murdered in rapid succession, a shocking theory emerges: Is someone killing off the detectives Christian worked alongside solving homicide cases? And is Katharina next?Now, Katharina and Christian must team up once again to catch the murderer before it’s too late. With their buried passion rising to the surface, they give in to their desire while racing against time to find the vengeful cop killer before he finds them.

Exit Row


Judi Culbertson - 2015
    But when Lee isn’t on the plane, Fiona begins to get nervous. It seems Lee isn’t the only passenger who never arrived. Three other people are also missing. Worse, it seems they were never on the flight.With no help from the airline, it’s up to Fiona and the friends and family of the missing passengers to discover what happened—and, more importantly, to find Lee. But when Fiona receives a mysterious note—It happened in between Denver and Taos—the patchwork team is thrust into a dangerous race against time…a race that could cost them more than who they’ve already lost. Published by William Morrow

Leaving Berlin


Joseph Kanon - 2014
    Almost four years after the war’s end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. In the West, a defiant, blockaded city is barely surviving on airlifted supplies; in the East, the heady early days of political reconstruction are being undermined by the murky compromises of the Cold War. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors.Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the cross-hairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. Worse, he discovers his real assignment — to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved. Changing sides in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector border. But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? At betrayal? Survival? Murder?Joseph Kanon’s compelling thriller is a love story that brilliantly brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life.

The Drumbeater


Clive Allan - 2013
    The task of unravelling the mystery falls to history graduate Neil Strachan, now a career cop, fast tracked into a new role on Northern Scotlands Major Enquiry Unit. When Neil calls upon German naval historian, Matthias Fuchs, to help identify the remains, a name soon emerges, that of a dashing young U-boat ace who mysteriously disappeared in 1941: Korvettenkapitän Max Friedmann. Neil seeks the assistance of Glendaig’s elderly residents, but encounters an impenetrable wall of silence, causing him to suspect that they know far more about the young submariner than they are willing to impart. With more questions than answers, and under mounting pressure from his cynical boss to wrap up the enquiry, Neil embarks on a race against time to discover the truth. He begins to unravel a tale of subterfuge, escape and astounding loyalty. A tale that will ultimately reveal a secret that could have changed the course of World War Two...

The Blood Flag


James W. Huston - 2015
    Hitler believed the Blood Flag, Blutfahne, carried sacred powers. It held the blood of the first Nazi martyrs, those killed in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, when Hitler first tried to take over Germany. Several Nazis were shot and fell onto the flag, pouring their blood into the already red fabric. That flag-with a white circle and a black swastika in the middle-still lives. Kyle Morrissey, a special agent for the FBI, travels to Europe with his father to see him receive the Legion of Honor from France for his service at Normandy. But after the ceremony, while traveling through Germany, Kyle and his family encounter neo-Nazis perpetuating the evil philosophy he thought his father's generation had ended once and for all. Kyle soon discovers that tens of thousands are ready to raise the swastika once more and renew the hatred of the thirties and forties. Baffled and furious, Kyle embarks on a personal mission to bring down the movement. But how? In trying to understand the history of Nazism, Kyle learns of the Blood Flag and knows it is the key to his success. From DC to Dresden to Recklinghausen and Argentina, the Blood Flag leads Kyle on a worldwide race in an attempt to end international Nazism for good.

The Stakes


Ben Sanders - 2018
    The latest from Ben Sanders, following his novels American Blood and Marshall’s Law.Rip-offs are a dangerous game, but heist man Miles Keller thinks he’s found a good strategy: rob rich New York criminals and then retire early, before word’s out about his true identity. New town, new name, no worries. Retirement can’t come soon enough, though. The NYPD is investigating him for the shooting of a hitman named Jack Deen, who was targeting Lucy Gates—a former police informant and Miles’s ex-lover. Miles thinks shooting hitmen counts as altruism, but in any case a murder charge would make life difficult. He’s ready to go to ground, but then Nina Stone reappears in his life. Nina is a fellow heist professional and the estranged wife of LA crime boss Charles Stone. Miles last saw her five years ago, and since then her life has grown more complicated: her husband wants her back, and he’s dispatched his go-to gun thug to play repo man. Complicating matters is the fact that the gun thug in question is Bobby Deen, cousin of the dead Jack Deen—and Bobby wants vengeance. The stakes couldn’t be higher, but Nina has an offer that could be lucrative. Maybe Miles can stick around a while longer…

The Secret of Lions


Scott Blade - 2013
    Often they were burned in public, lost in mountainous torrents of fire.One painting survived the flames.One painting held a fatal secretBarbara Howard was a young American art student; who studied in London. She was obsessed over discovering the unknown identity of the artist who painted the mysterious painting called THE SECRET OF LIONS.Barbara was determined to do what scholars had failed to do, uncover the story behind the painting.She investigated and discovered Evan, a secretive groundskeeper, working behind the scenes on a chilly London campus. Embarking on a passionate affair with Evan, Barbara learned the secret behind the painting. It became a secret that she could never escape.The story that Barbara uncovered would change her life forever.

Kiss the Girls


Pete Brassett - 2014
    And although he quickly builds up a semblance of normality around himself, his underlying inability to cope with the trauma of battle finally triggers a series of violent events that will become another man’s life-long obsession to reveal.

A Ghostly Shade of Pale


Merle Temple - 2013
    History files on a bygone era are ripped open and rewritten in temporal games with eternal consequences at the intersection between heaven and hell, between the visible and the Invisible.Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics Captain Michael Parker is an unlikely player in a struggle for the soul of America. A ghostly pale embodiment of evil becomes his obsession, and his tormentor leaves a trail of bodies across the South.As snipers ambush Michael and his agents on frozen fields of regret and the woman he loves is stalked by death, he learns that he is not alone as he has to fight for his life against enemies seen and unseen.

Zoo Station


David Downing - 2007
    He writes human-interest pieces for British and American papers, avoiding the investigative journalism that could get him deported. But as war approaches, he faces the prospect of having to leave his son and his longtime girlfriend. Then, an acquaintance from his communist days approaches him to do some work for the Soviets. Russell is reluctant but ultimately unable to resist. He becomes involved in other dangerous activities, helping a Jewish family and an idealistic American reporter. When the British and the Nazis notice his involvement with the Soviets, Russell is dragged into the world of warring intelligence services.

Water Memory


Daniel Pyne - 2021
    But when pirates seize the cargo ship she’s on, she must decide whether to risk her life to save her fellow passengers.Sentro’s training takes over, and she’s able to elude her captors, leaving bodies in her wake. But her problems are just getting started. Her memory lapses are getting more frequent, symptoms of serial-concussion syndrome.As she plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with the pirates, she pushes herself to survive by focusing on thoughts of her children. She’s never told them what she really does for a living, and now she might not get the chance.While her memories make her vulnerable, motherhood makes her dangerous.

The Secret Stealers


Jane Healey - 2021
    Everything changes when she’s recruited into the Office of Strategic Services by family friend and legendary WWI hero Major General William Donovan.Donovan has faith in her—and in all his “glorious amateurs” who are becoming Anna’s fast friends: Maggie, Anna’s down-to-earth mentor; Irene, who’s struggling to find support from her husband for her clandestine life; and Julia, a cheerful OSS liaison. But the more Anna learns about the organization’s secret missions, the more she longs to be stationed abroad. Then comes the opportunity: go undercover as a spy in the French Resistance to help steal critical intelligence that could ultimately turn the tide of the war.Dispatched behind enemy lines and in constant danger, Anna is filled with adrenaline, passion, and fear. She’s driven to make a difference—for her country and for herself. Whatever the risk, she’s willing to take it to help liberate France from the shadows of occupation and to free herself from the shadows of her former life.

Wolf Hook


Michael Wallace - 2013
    When his family returns to Germany just before the war, Jim arrives in the Third Reich as a young, sensitive theater student, both protected by and encumbered by his famous relation. Resisting an invitation to join the Nazis, he instead finds himself a member of an English-language theater troupe working in Occupied Europe. Unbeknownst to Jim, the leaders of the theater troupe, Nigel Burnside and his sister Margaret, are not the English fascists they appear, but members of the British Secret Service, using the theater troupe to recruit spies from among the Anglophile German officers who come to their productions.Disillusioned with both sides of the war, Jim is trying to defect to neutral Ireland when he stumbles into one of Nigel and Margaret’s most closely held secrets—a Hungarian physicist they are smuggling out of Europe. While trying to extricate himself from this unwelcome knowledge, he both manages to draw the attention of the Gestapo and to convince the British Secret Service that he is a Nazi spy, a threat to their plans who must be eliminated.