100 books like Lincoln's Spies

I love details, intrigue, and rigorous fact digging, and this book makes gripping reading as the authors detail the money, men, and machinations that went into the slave South’s secret war. 

It puts John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln in its proper, wider context of the Confederacy’s many plots against the Union–and you discover why and how Canada played an important role in the hidden war against the Union.

Lois Leveen uses a mixture of fact and well-researched speculation to bring Mary Bowser, a largely unknown Civil War hero, to the page. Free and educated in the North, Mary Bowser returned to slavery to spy on the Confederacy in the household of Jefferson Davis. This much, at least, is known about the woman. Leveen imagines Bowser’s early life, braids in national history, and leaves us breathless with wonder at the courage and audacity required to complete the assignment Bowser accepted.

I love novels that pick up where the historical record ends, especially novels that do so lovingly and with such tender respect for the real woman lost in history.

This is more historical fiction than nonfiction, but the backmatter contains notes, a bibliography, and a decent index.

It details the work of four Civil War-era women who made significant contributions to the war effort on both sides. Flamboyant teenager Belle Boyd and scheming temptress Rose O’Neal Greenhow spied for the South; Emma Edmonds enlisted in the Union Army as Frank Thompson; and secret abolitionist Elizabeth Van Lew managed an espionage ring under the noses of her Richmond neighbors.

I cheered each one of them through the entire book, wondering if I could have been as strong and resolute as they were. They didn’t cower in their homes. They stood up and made their lives count in an era when the overwhelming majority of women did no such thing.

As both a writer and a reader, I fell in love with this book (well, as a writer, I was also wildly jealous of how easy Cole makes it look, but that’s another story) because she takes a fraught subject—interracial romance during the Civil War—and managed to create a spy romance that I simply could not put down until I turned the last page.

Often with spy novels, there’s an emphasis on heroism, but what I appreciated about this book was how the emphasis was on Elle doing heroic things all in the pursuit of wanting to live a quiet, boring life with the man she loves (Malcolm).

It's a great series, and I’m hoping Cole goes back to tell the story of Malcolm’s sister.

These are the first books I read on the American Civil War as an adult (thank you, History Book Club). Catton lets the reader march with the Army of the Potomac through the war in the east. You don’t just learn what happened, and why. You feel what it was like to be there. Catton never forgets the need to make history a good read as well as a way to transmit information. 

It may seem odd to have a Civil War book on a Civil Rights book recommendation list, but many of the issues faced by the Civil Rights movement, in many respects, were unfinished business from the times preceding and post the Civil War. 

What this book does, aside from touching on the various battles, is to touch on the social, political, and economic scenarios in both the north and south prior to the War, during the War, and afterward during the reconstruction period.

Worth bearing in mind in some cases survivors of the Civil War period were only a couple of generations removed from the conflict at the time of the Civil Rights movement. Aside from being a great read, this book provides an invaluable resource of information.

Is this the best book on the Agency, probably not. Is this a full history? No again. But it is the first book I bought and read on the Agency, and it kickstarted my passion for secrecy and covert action. I found the account, perhaps, a bit biased. There aren’t only failures in the history of the CIA, but the failures sure are many, and Weiner portrays them with accuracy and flair. The degree of access to participants is also exceptional, and I was drawn immediately into the Agency schemes.

How many failures can an Agency take? How can we reconcile secrecy with a democratic society? After reading the book, I felt like I did not have all the answers, but I certainly wanted to find out more. The book’s story ended in 2007, but a sequel is coming in 2025.

In this novel, the US president needs a campaign issue, so he makes the Columbian cartels a “clear and present danger” and sends covert forces into that country.

I love that Clancy shows me two worlds that I don’t really know: the powerful American politicians who will do anything to stay in power and the inside workings of the Columbian cartels who deeply care about their families.

Published in 1989, Clancy dared to show US politicians eagerly using our military in covert missions to further their own political agenda and that they would also readily sacrifice those troops if it suited their political needs. In this way, he broke the glass ceiling that would later be followed by Brad Thor, Vince Flynn, and others. 

Almost criminally neglected, McCarry is the greatest American espionage writer. After serving for ten years as an elite deep-cover agent for the CIA, no one could better write of the “long, twilight struggle” of the Cold War. McCarry doesn’t write thrillers, but spare, character-driven stories about spies and the morally treacherous world in which they work. The Secret Lovers is an absorbing tale of betrayal and a relentless, perilous search for truth. McCarry’s masterpiece.

Beautifully written masterwork on one of the most important wars of the 19th century. It takes the reader from the experience of ordinary soldiers in battle to key debates around the cabinet table, in a rare display of dexterity and understanding of all levels of war. You will enter Grant’s HQ from where he ran the critical Western theater of operations and sit across from Lincoln as he makes the key decision for a hard war that let the Union maximize its resources and win. And you will walk into Lee’s HQ where the Confederacy lost the war in bursts of Southern hubris that led to two ill-conceived invasions of the North that provoked the final crushing.