100 books like Target Acquired

I loved this book because it’s about misfits. In this case, misfits who are spies. Spies who have screwed up and disgraced themselves and their masters at the British Secret Service. They’re led by the disheveled and malodorous Jackson Lamb, who is so smart he disdains everyone around him.

He and the Slow Horses get all the bad assignments, but I loved how each of them possessed special skills and a desire to redeem themselves. I think Mick Herron is the master of humorous spy fiction!  

The action and adventure in this story were perfect for the thrill-seeker in me. I already knew that being an undercover agent as a teen would make for an interesting storyline, but then the author makes Christy join a group of adrenaline junkies, and the stakes keep getting higher, and the thrills keep getting scarier.

The thing that I loved most about this book was how each chapter end left me hanging and I had to keep reading to find out what happened next. I especially felt a kinship for Christy because, even though she is a teenager who is learning who she is, she is also a protector who has been enlisted by the FBI to save people. There is also a storyline of true love and friendship that grounded me and made me feel for the characters. 

As a cross-genre “mystery writer,” I’m not big on fiction classifications. This book, like most great books, defies pigeonholing. Some would say “crime novel,” some “western,” others “thriller,” others still, “adventure.”  

Regardless, if the first sentence of this book doesn’t hook you, nothing will. It is nothing short of mastery. Character-driven story-telling at its finest, running a reader through a gauntlet of gut-wrenching emotions with ease—poignant, gritty, tongue-in-cheek, and often horrific. Perfectly seasoned with Texas cornpone, this coming-of-age western tale is a fist full. I loved it.

In The Last Thing to Burn, Will Dean is very clever in his choice of location and how it’s become a prison for Jane.

Jane lives in a small cottage with her farmer husband surrounded by paddocks. The whole book is set in the cramped confines of the small cottage, where Jane’s husband rules over her and punishes her if she does anything wrong. Jane’s completely cut off from the rest of the world. Her whole world is the cottage.

I love the way Jane slowly realises that she may have a way out, and we join her, heart in mouth, as she plans her escape. I’ve never raced through the last forty pages of a book so fast!

A gem of a book and another one that I read again and again. It’s not just the wonderful writing and the moody atmosphere; I love the way that le Carré explores the moral ambiguity in spying during this early part of the Cold War.

I read an interview in which le Carré talked about the pleasure of secrecy and enjoying the feeling that you know something that others don’t. I get that "I’ve got a secret" idea and I’ve used that thought in my own work. Le Carré was also a spy.

I struggled to put this book on a crime novel list, but this is one of my favorite books of all time. At its heart, it’s a spy novel. It makes the list because the main character hunts bad agents–the internal affairs of the CIA.

The book opens with a murder crime scene in New York. If you haven’t heard about this book, it’s a true phenomenon. Many times, during book signings, I’ve been asked by readers if I knew of this book and how much they absolutely loved it. More importantly, though, they wanted me to tell them when the sequel was coming out. This book came out in 2014, and the sequel came out this year, ten years later. It garners 95k reviews on Amazon, which alone tells you all you need to know.

A compelling story of spies and lies, but even more so of the woman victimized by an elaborate espionage system (the Stasi in East Germany).

I found the setting particularly interesting as the story follows the lead-up to the Berlin Wall falling and the aftermath.

The story moves along at a good pace. Overall a very satisfying read.

So, yeah, I saved the big gun for last. I read a lot of Le Carré in high school before I was ready to understand the full texture of his stories, but the vibes have stuck with me to this day.

Magnus Pym both embodies and subverts many tropes from the spy fiction genre, and experiencing this book as a teenager helped me start to make sense of the very personal real-world tensions between “who I am” and “who I appear to be” and “who I want to be.”

I still wrestle with those questions, but my reasons for doing or not doing things haven’t changed all that much. As a wise woman once said: “That’s how we’re going to win. Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love.”

I chose this for authenticity. Newsday's review said it was "chillingly real" and "the reader himself seems to be traveling with 'the Jackal.'"

That’s because Forsyth, as a foreign correspondent working in Europe and Africa, knew assassins, mercenaries, and arms dealers, which allowed him to craft fantastic but believable characters, settings, and situations. Forsyth opens the novel with the depiction of a real assassination attempt, employs historical figures, locations, and details, then seamlessly weaves his fictional plot into this authentic world.

Forsyth reveals lives most of us can only imagine, and he shows that wall-to-wall suspense does not require wall-to-wall action, but is built on plausible intrigue, sustained tension, and excellent writing.

A savage, icepick of a hitman novel that will bury itself in your cerebellum. It’s a slippery, sexy book about the making and subsequent unmaking of a contract killer, complete with all the usual trappings and a few resolutely unusual ones. halfway through this novel, I realized that there weren't any rules to this. That you just built humans from scratch and turned them loose in your world and whatever they did, they did.  A guy stabs someone with his own fibula in this book. Eat that Macgyver.