Here are 82 books that Marathon Man fans have personally recommended if you like
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Raised in a proud Jewish home, I was instilled with an appreciation for my cultural heritage from a very young age. Today, I am utterly fascinated with the convergence of Judaism and popular culture in film, television, comics, literature, and other media. After college, I became a freelance entertainment journalist, writing stories for SYFY WIRE,The Hollywood Reporter,Forbes, and Marvel Entertainment. I currently reside in Philadelphia with my wife, Leora, and adorable Cavapoo, Archie.
In someone else’s hands, the tale of a global Nazi conspiracy to restore the Third Reich to its former glory by cloning Adolf Hitler would probably come off as utter insanity. But Levin makes you believe every word of it, funneling the story through the eyes of Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann (based on Simon Wiesenthal) and infamous doctor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Josef Mengele.
In this classic thriller, Ira Levin imagines Dr Josef Mengele's nightmarish plot to restore the Third Reich. Alive and hiding in South America, thirty years after the end of the Second World War, Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a sinister project - the creation of the Fourth Reich. Ageing Nazi hunter Yakov Lieberman is informed of the plot but before he hears the evidence, his source is killed . . .
Spanning continents and inspired by true events, what follows is one of Levin's most masterful tales, both timeless and chillingly plausible.
When the war ended, we all felt the horrors of war were finally over. My cousins were back from Europe, and all seemed at peace once again. We were wrong. A few years later I was a young journalist editing stories about Soviet-held Berlin and how Russia stopped the West from sending food and even coal to residents in West Berlin. That was just the beginning.
ODESSA was a port-war organization established to re-establish the power of SS mass murderers throughout the world and carry out Hitler’s Final Solution 20 years after his death.
In researching for ODESSA Files, Forsyth talked to several former SS members and used their memories to enhance the atmosphere and feeling of reality throughout the book.
It’s a look at what Hitler and the SS had in mind for the world. Almost every chapter bristles with suspense and excitement when a journalist starts to expose them. It’s cleverly plotted and has you on edge from start to finish.
The suicide of an elderly German Jew explodes into revelation after revelation: of a Mafia-like organization called Odessa ...of a real-life fugitive known as the "Butcher of Riga"..of a young German journalist tumed obsessed avenger.......and, ultimately, of brilliant, ruthless plot to reestablish the worldwide power of SS mass murderers and to carry out Hitler's chilling "Final Solution."
I fell in love with Alfred Hitchcock’s films as a kid. Something that stuck out to me was that so many of his films featured an ordinary but resourceful hero who found themselves at the center of a crisis that they were totally ill-equipped to deal with. Still, they endured by rising above the situation. When I started writing, I wanted to write books with hardboiled heroes, but I fell back on first-time heroes who find themselves out of their depth and swim against the tide. Once I recognized this style, it was something I embraced. I’ve gotten out of my depth so many times…sometimes of my own making and sometimes not.
Guilt, shame, and family obligation…these human aspects are a great basis for a down-to-earth protagonist. A young woman is murdered in Will’s family home, and his brother is the prime suspect. On her deathbed, Will’s mother tells Will to find his brother.
This quest puts Will at the center of the investigation because many people want Will’s brother found…dead or alive. It’s one of those stories that escalates, which kept me hooked as a reader. It has a simple premise but evolves into something far more complex that will change Will forever.
Will Klein lost the love of his life and his brother in the same moment ... A superb thriller from the No.1 bestselling author.
On October 17, eleven years ago, Julie Miller was found brutally strangled in the basement of her house in the township of Livingston, New Jersey. On that day, Will's brother, Ken Klein, became the subject of an international manhunt accused of the crime. He has not been seen since.
Will has tried to get on with his life in the intervening years. He has a beautiful new girlfriend, Sheila, and a job working with the homeless.…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
Raised in a proud Jewish home, I was instilled with an appreciation for my cultural heritage from a very young age. Today, I am utterly fascinated with the convergence of Judaism and popular culture in film, television, comics, literature, and other media. After college, I became a freelance entertainment journalist, writing stories for SYFY WIRE,The Hollywood Reporter,Forbes, and Marvel Entertainment. I currently reside in Philadelphia with my wife, Leora, and adorable Cavapoo, Archie.
The bestsellers penned by Forsyth, Levin, and Goldman would not exist without the true stories of the men and women who worked tirelessly in the years after World War II to bring escaped Nazis to justice.
Nagorski’s wonderfully researched work of non-fiction shines a much-deserved light on those individuals who sought closure on behalf of the murdered 6 million when no one else cared to do so: Fritz Bauer, Simon Wiesenthal, Tuvia Friedman, Elizabeth Holtzman, Beate, and Serge Klarsfeld, and more.
More than seven decades after the end of the Second World War, the era of the Nazi Hunters is drawing to a close as they and the hunted die off. Their saga can now be told almost in its entirety. After the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War, most of the victors in World War II lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Many of the lower-ranking perpetrators quickly blended in with the millions who were seeking to rebuild their lives in a new Europe, while those who felt most at risk fled the continent. In Pursuit…
Raised in a proud Jewish home, I was instilled with an appreciation for my cultural heritage from a very young age. Today, I am utterly fascinated with the convergence of Judaism and popular culture in film, television, comics, literature, and other media. After college, I became a freelance entertainment journalist, writing stories for SYFY WIRE,The Hollywood Reporter,Forbes, and Marvel Entertainment. I currently reside in Philadelphia with my wife, Leora, and adorable Cavapoo, Archie.
Every book list needs a good wild card, wouldn’t you agree?
This Dark Horse one-shot published in the run-up to the premiere for Amazon’s Hunters is only a few pages long, but perfectly encapsulates the pulpy spirit of the revenge-driven series created by David Weil. Mr. Weil has stated on numerous occasions that the small screen project was a way for him to pay homage to his Holocaust survivor grandmother and tell an epic, comic book-inspired story of good vs. evil.
The one-shot does just that as the titular squad of Nazi eliminators tracks down a concentration camp doctor notorious for conducting unspeakable human experiments and collecting gruesome trophies.
Ruth Heidelbaum has secret to kill for—hundreds of Nazis are hiding in the United States, and she's on a bloody quest to take them out, one by one. She and her rag-tag teammates call themselves THE HUNTERS, and it's kill, rinse, repeat, until justice has finally been served to every last one of them. This is not murder...it's mitzvah!
I fell in love with Alfred Hitchcock’s films as a kid. Something that stuck out to me was that so many of his films featured an ordinary but resourceful hero who found themselves at the center of a crisis that they were totally ill-equipped to deal with. Still, they endured by rising above the situation. When I started writing, I wanted to write books with hardboiled heroes, but I fell back on first-time heroes who find themselves out of their depth and swim against the tide. Once I recognized this style, it was something I embraced. I’ve gotten out of my depth so many times…sometimes of my own making and sometimes not.
This book is a big box thriller that I love, where the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of a simple man. In this case, he’s an academic professor decoding a medieval manuscript that will upset the world order. I was hooked by the out-of-their-depth hero in this story.
He is continually outgunned, outmanned, and outnumbered. However, an ordinary guy like Xander Jaspers discovers he's more resourceful and skilled than expected.
It has long been rumoured that a sixteenth-century monk called Eisenreich out-Machiavellied Machiavelli, writing a masterplan for the Church to achieve world domination. So dangerous was the text that the Pope had to kill Eisenreich to suppress it.
But when the bullet-riddled body of a young girl is found in the mid-West and "Eisenreich" is her dying word, it becomes terrifyingly clear that not only is the document real, but someone is planning to use it.
Sarah Trent, a US agent, and Xander Jaspers, a Columbia University professor, race to find this manuscript, but neither fully understand the danger they're…
Ron Burley has a rule against messing around with married women, but lovely Lavender has convinced him to break it. Their steamy affair sets someone off, but it isn’t Lavender’s clueless husband—it’s Marta, Burley’s clingy childhood friend and ex-lover.
I fell in love with Alfred Hitchcock’s films as a kid. Something that stuck out to me was that so many of his films featured an ordinary but resourceful hero who found themselves at the center of a crisis that they were totally ill-equipped to deal with. Still, they endured by rising above the situation. When I started writing, I wanted to write books with hardboiled heroes, but I fell back on first-time heroes who find themselves out of their depth and swim against the tide. Once I recognized this style, it was something I embraced. I’ve gotten out of my depth so many times…sometimes of my own making and sometimes not.
This one is a banger. A serial killer has picked Bill, a bartender, to play a game of who lives and who dies. Choose your own slaughter, if you will.
What's so deviously gorgeous about this book is how the hero must learn how to beat the game so that no one dies and he can stop a twisted killer in his tracks. It’s such a great premise for an out-of-their-depth hero.
If you don’t take this note to the police . . . I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher. . . . If you do . . . I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours.
The typewritten note under his windshield seems like just a sick joke. But in less than twenty-four hours, Billy Wiles, an ordinary, hardworking guy, is about to see his life take on the speed of a nightmare. Because a young blond schoolteacher is murdered—and now Billy has…
I fell in love with Alfred Hitchcock’s films as a kid. Something that stuck out to me was that so many of his films featured an ordinary but resourceful hero who found themselves at the center of a crisis that they were totally ill-equipped to deal with. Still, they endured by rising above the situation. When I started writing, I wanted to write books with hardboiled heroes, but I fell back on first-time heroes who find themselves out of their depth and swim against the tide. Once I recognized this style, it was something I embraced. I’ve gotten out of my depth so many times…sometimes of my own making and sometimes not.
I love a “Man on the Run” book. Books like The 39 Steps, Odd Man Out, and The Running Man are stories I truly love. There's something exciting about a chase book because the hero has to be resourceful and resilient, and that’s what we have here.
Harry has to prove his innocence. The other aspect of a chase story is all the odd characters a hero on the run has to turn to for help when there is no one else to turn to, even if they can't be trusted, but Harry has to put his faith in them for the few moments he needs them. Great stuff.
'One of Britain's most consistently excellent crime novelists' Marcel Berlins, The Times
A friendship renewed; a marriage going sour; Harry Bentick heads for the Lake District not knowing if he's going in search of something or running away.
Then two girls are found murdered in the high fells, and suddenly there's no doubt about it.
He's running.
Set in his native Cumberland, this was Reginald Hill's very first novel, a unique blend of detective story, psychological thriller and Buchanesque adventure that was to lay the groundwork for many books to come, taking him into the top ranks of British crime…
I love books about everyman/everywoman characters facing danger, puzzles, and romance with a sense of humor. I love the suspense that builds throughout a whole book and the tension that can develop in just a paragraph. It’s easier for me to imagine I’m the protagonist and lose myself in the pages if I’m not reading about a superhero or a serial killer. With so many choices out there, it’s easier to find another person who’s seen the same TV show, for instance, but books are my true love because they are limitless and offer so many choices. It’s a privilege to be able to share some favorites.
I love surprises and characters who are not what they seem, and I enjoy a high-tech backdrop when it fits the story. When a character thinks he sees evidence of a crime in what’s basically Google Street View, he will not let go of it and drags our unwilling protagonist into danger.
I loved the emotional core of a man dealing with his brother’s mental health issues and the blossoming romance in his life.
What would you do if you witnessed a murder - but no one believed you . . .?
Another masterful suspense novel from the bestselling author of the Richard & Judy summer read winner, NO TIME FOR GOODBYE and FIND YOU FIRST
Map-obsessed Thomas spends his days and nights on a virtual tour of the world through his computer screen, believing he must store the details of every town and city in his head. Then one day, while surfing a street view program, he sees something that shouldn't be there: a woman being murdered behind a window on a New…
Five days before the end of humanity, five unlikely heroes find themselves on an impossible quest to outlive the apocalypse.
5 Stars is the survival story of a mother and her baby facing impossible odds amidst a global apocalypse. Set in a dying world overseen by “The Neon God,” the…
I have been writing about James Baldwin for over twenty years and have been reading him since my teens. My father saw the writer debate the conservative polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. at the University of Cambridge in 1965, and I’ve been hooked since he told me about that event. I’ve written three books on Baldwin, scores of articles, and book chapters, and I co-founded the journal James Baldwin Review a decade ago. It's been wonderful to see Baldwin gain popularity over the last decade, and I hope that more people continue to read his essays, novels, plays, and poetry.
I remember feeling exhausted the first time I finished reading Baldwin’s last novel. In common with many novels published during the late 1970s, this is a saga, a sprawling account of interlocking families and characters across thirty years. It takes the reader to the US, South, London, Korea, Paris, and Africa. It is also a pioneering book that describes an intense sexual relationship between African American men.
As I’ve read Baldwin over the last twenty-plus years, I’ve relished seeing patterns and themes that cut across his work. One of his earliest essays, “Journey to Atlanta,” published in 1948, is an account of his brother David’s trip to the US South as part of a gospel quartet, a story that is played out in his final novel. As with much of Baldwin’s work, this novel explores love, family, and politics.
James Baldwin’s final novel is “the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers” (The New York Times Book Review).
“Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.”
The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this stunning, unforgettable novel. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, James Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the forbidden passion of Giovanni’s Room, and to the political fire that enflames his…