Fans pick 93 books like Takedown

Tom Wood immediately swept to the top of my list of great thriller writers when I read this book. It’s the first in the Victor Assassin series and its adrenaline-fuelled excitement gripped me from the first sentence to the final full stop.

Victor is hired to kill a man in Paris and to take the memory stick he is carrying, but Victor’s paymasters aren’t all they seem, and Victor quickly finds himself at the wrong end of a gun barrel when a hit squad is sent to eliminate him.

But Victor won’t be taken out that easily. He shoots his way free of the ambush and fights to stay alive long enough to work out who’s behind what’s happening. The underlying plot is slowly revealed and leads to a great dramatic conclusion.

This is the first book in Tom Cain’s series about the assassin Samuel Carver. It’s full of believable action and has a great storyline. Do you remember the conspiracy rumours surrounding the death of Dianna Princess of Wales? Well, in this story, Carver was responsible for the car crash that killed her, having been tricked into setting it up.

It’s a great thriller, full of exciting action from start to finish as he tries to work out who set him up. Carver then becomes the target himself when those who tricked him realise he is learning too much and has to be silenced.

I first read this book not because of interest—in fact, I hadn’t read anything else by its author, Robert Ludlum. Instead, I read this novel because I had been told that my writing was like that of Ludlum’s.

And that is startlingly true. It was as if reading something I had forgotten having written but which was richer with a depth of ever-increasing emotional nuances than works of a comparable kind. It’s a compelling read.

Through a combination of unusual story elements and narrative style, this novel engages a reader in the main character’s journey to discover his forgotten identity. Although this isn’t an all-that-unusual aspect of story-telling, the espionage element makes it a singular literary experience. Over the course of the novel, I progressively felt as if I were spending time with a really awesome friend. And this is owed to, I think, the “slow burn” of empathy compelled… show more.

Although this is non-fiction, I’ve included this book in my list because it’s written in a thriller style. The true-life security service missions it describes are written like a first-person novel and are as page-turning as many thrillers.

The author was an officer in a secret group responsible for counter-terrorism, and these tales of his missions are delivered, not like a record of events, but as a story. I don’t frequently read non-fiction, but I recommend this because of the way in which the content is presented. You’re there – you feel the adrenalin, the fear, and the tension as the missions unfold on the pages.

The Desert and the Sown is perhaps the most personal of all Gertrude Bell’s travel books revealing a deeply affectionate engagement with the people and places of Syria. It is the first of her books that I read while researching the subject of Bedouin tribes in early 20th century Syria. I wanted to know what connection the Bedouin tribal elites had to the major trading cities such as Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo. There, in her description of Damascus, she revealed the evidence I had been looking for: “In Damascus the sheikhs of the richer tribes have their townhouses; you may meet Muhammad of the Hasene or Bassan of the Beni Rashid peacocking down the bazaars on a fine Friday; in embroidered cloaks and purple and silver kerchiefs fastened about their brows with camel’s hair ropes bound with gold…” I can just see those tribal leaders now in my mind’s… show more.

I cannot ignore the turmoil that has become Syria over the past decade. Many books have appeared about the peaceful demonstrations that turned violent and a civil war and a proxy war for Iran, Russia, the US, and various Arab states. This book provides a detailed history of how Syria descended into such violence.  It gave me a detailed understanding of how the ‘Opposition’ to the Asad government emerged in the country. And engages with the stories of the Opposition fighters in their exile in adjacent countries. Concluding that the war is not yet over, it provides some hope for those of us who watch from a distance as Russia and Iran reposition and redeploy in response to other critical global events.  

The definitive account so far of the Syrian civil war, and of the insurgency against the dictatorship of Bashar Assad.  Sam Dagher combines a literary sensibility, deep knowledge of Syria, and acquaintance with the people on the ground, and an ability for tireless and dogged reporting and truth-seeking. The passages dealing with the Assad regime’s slaughter of arrested civilians in its jails are harrowing and are a reminder of the horrifying nature of this regime and the need for it to remain isolated and under pressure. At the same time, Dagher remains a cool and dispassionate analyst of the progress of the conflict, and of the factors which enabled the regime and its allies to prevail.  

What can I say? I cried more than a few times reading Lindsey Hilsum’s humanizing and deeply personal biography of Marie Colvin. Hilsum’s brilliant portrait paints a figure that burns a little too brightly with life to live long in this world of ours. 

She took her first reporting job with UPI and then transferred to the Sunday Times where she garnered the Sunday Times where she garnered the reputation of the kind of reporter who could get stories that no one else could. She was the first to interview Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and Hilsum’s heart-pounding description put me right in the bunker with her as she nervously clicked on her tape recorder for the interview under the watchful gaze of several armed guards. From there, Colvin covered some of the 1990s' most consequential combat zones, reflecting the chaos that ensued from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In… show more.

Salma and her mom live in a refugee camp in Canada, and they miss Salma’s dad, who is still in Syria. Salma decides to cook a Syrian meal for her mom, but to make the meal a success, she needs to get help and ingredients from everyone in the village. I loved how making and sharing the food they miss from their home in Syria helped Salma and her mom start to build a new community. And the illustrations are as delicious as the food they cook! 

Janine Di Giovanni is a daring foreign correspondent with decades of experience covering the Middle East. Her reporting from the trenches is riveting.

She takes you inside the massacres, as she waits in halls, tunnels, and burned-out buildings with those whose stories she came to tell. If it wasn’t true, this book would be read alongside the best thriller writers.