Bad Actors begins and ends with beatings, apparently lethal or soon to be so. In between, it’s filled with plots, machinations, and enough back stabbings to impress Julius Caesar. Most of those are perpetrated by members of Her Majesty’s Government … Continue reading Bad Actors | Book Review
I recently heard Brad Thor describe his novels as “faction,” a portmanteau of fact and fiction. Rising Tiger begins with a factual battle between Chinese and Indian forces in the Galwan Valley of the western Himalayas, where China and India … Continue reading Rising Tiger | Book Review
Stephen Grant is pastor of St. Mary’s Lutheran Church, a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod congregation in Manorville, a hamlet on Long Island’s East End. Previously, he was an assassin for the Central Intelligence Agency. His two vocations come together in Warrior … Continue reading Warrior Monk | Book Review
Steven Konkoly’s Deep Sleep opens with Hezbollah successfully firing missiles at Haifa (Prologue), pivots to a woman kidnapping an elderly man from a retirement home near Branson, Missouri (Chapter 1), then pivots again to a security team forcefully extracting a … Continue reading Deep Sleep | Book Review
Silesian Station is the second installment in David Downing’s series of novels featuring Anglo-American journalist John Russell. It is set primarily in Berlin in the summer of 1939, just before the Nazi invasion of Poland, although Russell travels to other … Continue reading Silesian Station | Book Review
Zoo Station (2007) is David Downing’s first novel featuring John Russell. Russell is an Anglo-American freelance journalist living and working in Berlin in the early months of 1939. A former Communist with a loathing for the Nazis, Russell remains in … Continue reading Zoo Station | Book review
Mick Herron’s Slough House is where MI5 deposits the spooks it wants to fire but can’t, hoping they will quit out of shame, boredom, or fear of Jackson Lamb, the unhygienic Cold Warrior who rules the place like a personal … Continue reading The Catch | Book Review
Joe Country is the eighth installment in Mick Herron’s series about a motley group of disgraced agents whom MI5 cannot fire outright, so it sends them to Slough House instead and hopes the boredom of their tasks there grinds them into … Continue reading Joe Country | Book Review
When Daniel Silva publishes a new Gabriel Allon novel, I read it as quickly as I can. I get up early to read it, catch a few pages during breaks throughout the day, and stay up late until it’s finished. Some people binge-watch their favorite shows on Netflix. I binge-read spy books. And so it was with The Other Woman, the latest installment in Silva’s long-running series. In it, Gabriel Allon, chief of Israel’s Mossad, discovers there’s a mole near the top of a Western intelligence agency. Discovering who the mole is and what agency has been compromised before any … Continue reading The Other Woman | Book Review
The Honourable Schoolboy is the second book in John Le Carré’s “Karla Trilogy,” in which George Smiley of Britain’s MI6 engages Russia’s KGB in clandestine warfare. In the first book—Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—Smiley exposed a long-time mole in the “Circus,” … Continue reading The Honourable Schoolboy | Book Review
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