I guess my real interest in writing about the good and bad in crime and politics and the good and bad characters involved started with my first job as a junior in a local newspaper. The 60s was a time of great change. I was in the right place at the right time and got involved in reporting local government politics. I graduated later to cover Britain’s role within the EU in Brussels. I was fascinated, not so much by the politics but by the politicians and fellow news reporters involved. They inspired the creation of my fictional character, Pete West, a hardboiled political columnist.
The first and best of my list from the master spy himself.
It is a complicated plot that is skillfully and gradually laid bare in what starts as a murder investigation by a retired MI6 agent and ends as a political coup for the ‘Circus’ (MI6).
A great read from the start; I think this is one of Le Carre’s best and one that helped influence me in my writing. The book is much better than the TV or movie versions, and le Carre’s characterisation of Smiley is superb.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Our Kind of Traitor; and The Night Manager, now a television series starring Tom Hiddleston.
Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman...
A very junior agent answers Vladimir's call, but it could have been the Chief of the Circus himself. No one at the British Secret Service considers the old spy to be anything except a senile has-been who can't give up the game-until he's shot in the face at point-blank range. Although George Smiley (code name: Max) is officially retired, he's summoned to identify the body now…
Powerful descriptive work here that puts you in situ.
It is a dark and mysterious book about a journalist who is asked to look into the disappearance of a rich Swedish industrialist’s niece. I love the complicated plot, which reveals the criminal and social injustices of modern upper society, the story of a young girl (with the tattoo), and the way she was treated by the privileged few.
I thought the characterisation, particularly of the girl, was excellent.
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder - and that the killer is a member of his own tightly-knit but dysfunctional family.
He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet's disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history.
Read as a teenager, this book hooked me into mystery thrillers. It has everything from murder to political intrigue to a spy ring.
The book is a chase thriller with twists, turns, and surprises. Written in 1930, the work had the feel of a ‘boy's own’ adventure story with a man on the run hunting German spies and clues leading to the 39 steps and victory.
Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London. But then a murder is committed in his flat, just days after a chance encounter with an American who had told him about an assassination plot which could have dire international consequences. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland where he will need all his courage and ingenuity to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.
This book moved me at a time when the Irish question was still an open sore. It has a great but simple plot centered around the peace process in Northern Ireland.
Ex CIA agent, Osbourne is involved after his father-in-law is sent to the UK as Ambassador. With three atrocities carried out by protestants and a plot to assassinate the ambassador, the clock starts ticking. Osbourne faces his old enemy, Russian KGB killer October.
It is obvious that de Silva did a lot of research on the Irish situation, and I found the story very exciting as well as thought-provoking.
A brilliantly tense what-if thriller about the sabotage of the Ulster peace process.
From the No.1 bestselling author of THE CELLIST
During the first uncertain years of the Northern Ireland peace process three simultaneous terrorist attacks in Belfast, Dublin and London shatter the hope that the bloodshed is finally over. The perpetrators are a new terror group called the Ulster Freedom Brigade. And they have one goal: to destroy the peace process.
Michael Osbourne, hero of THE MARK OF THE ASSASSIN, has quit the CIA, bitter and disillusioned. But when the President chooses his father-in-law to be the next American…
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun.” The first line of one of the great Phillip Marlowe books that I fell in love with.
As a young man, I often went to work with a Raymond Chandler paperback in my pocket. I couldn't put him down. I wanted to be Marlowe and talk like him. Chandler created a hero who taught me American slang language and how to talk the talk. The book follows Marlowe as he looks for the lost girlfriend of a guy just released from prison.
This is a wonderful noir work about a hard-boiled private detective.
The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the forthcoming film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson
Philip Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.
Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, who is later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.
Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the Bilderbergs' plan. Desperate, West abandons their last clue to save a parliamentarian from assassination. Questions remain, which are answered unexpectedly by the BBC.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
