Historical Mystery Spy

On vacation from London on the beautiful Italian coast, 28-year-old Elena Standish and her older sister Margot have finally been able to forget some of the lasting trauma of the Great War. Touring with her camera in hand, Elena has found new inspiration in the striking Italian landscape, and she's met an equally striking man named Ian. Not ready to part from one another, she and Ian share a train trip home to England. But a shocking murder disrupts their agenda, forcing Elena to personally deliver a message to Berlin that could change the fate of Europe.

Red Square, 1985. The naked body of a young man is left outside the walls of the Kremlin, frozen solid - like marble to the touch - missing the little finger from his right hand. A week later, Alex Marston, the headstrong 15-year-old daughter of the British ambassador, disappears. Army Intelligence Officer Tom Fox, posted to Moscow to keep him from telling the truth to a government committee, is asked to help find her. It's a shot at redemption.

1963. In a desolate Russian penal colony, the radio blares the news of President Kennedy’s death. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin’s new post as director of a gulag camp in the middle of a frozen tundra is far from a promotion. This is where disgraced agents, like Vasin, are sent to disappear and die quietly. But when tensions in the camp mount and a violent revolt breaks out, Vasin finds himself on the run with a mysterious prisoner holding the most dangerous secret in the world: who ordered the murder of President Kennedy.

The Second World War rages on, but Britain now faces the Nazi threat with America at its side. In a bombed-out London swarming with gangsters and spies, DCI Frank Merlin continues his battle against rampant wartime crime. A mangled body is found in the Thames just as some items of priceless art go mysteriously missing. What sinister connection links the two? Merlin and his team follow a twisting trail of secrets and lies as they investigate a baffling and deadly puzzle.

The last thing Eleanora Quinton expects when the dead body hits the floor, is love with the son of a duke. As society’s most capable housekeeper, Eleanora has conquered any number of social disasters. But when a dead body falls right into the middle of her mistress’ ball and her son gets kidnapped, the only person who can help her also forces her to face her most crippling fears

Jane Seymour of Wiltshire is not meant to go to Court. Not a child like her, with her lack of beauty and no title. But family connections are enough to have her named to the bridal retinue of Mary Tudor. At the French Court, the plain and docile Jane meets the girl who will grow into her rival in years to come: the already charismatic and conniving Anne Boleyn. Soon back home in the English countryside, Jane wants nothing more than peace and quiet—and the devotion of her childhood protector, William Dormer.

Only she knows the truth. Only he can tell the world. Vienna, 1946. A brilliant German scientist spirited out of the ruins Nazi Europe in search of a new life. Moscow, 1964. A rising star of the British diplomatic service whose job is not what it seems. London, the present day. A once promising academic offered an opportunity to seal his place in history. Their stories, their lives, and the fate of the world, are bound by a single document: The Scarlet Papers. The devastating secrets contained within teased by a brief invitation: Tomorrow 11AM. Take a cab and pay in cash. Tell no one.

It's 1977. Ike and Lucy, Senator Charlie and Margaret Marder's kids, are grown up—and in trouble. US Marine Ike has gone somewhat off the grid, working on Evel Knievel's pit crew in Montana, when—after a bar fight—he has to flee a neo-Nazi gang and seek refuge in the woods with a group of Vietnam veterans. Lucy, a reporter, has become the star of the brand-new Washington DC tabloid, the Sentinel, and is breaking all sorts of stories about a serial killer and falling in with the Lyons, the wealthy family that owns the newspaper.

After Germany's invasion of Poland, the world is holding its breath and hoping for peace. At home, the Nazi Party's hold on power is absolute. One freezing night, an SS doctor and his wife return from an evening mingling with their fellow Nazis at the concert hall. By the time the sun rises, the doctor will be lying lifeless in a pool of blood. Was it murder or suicide? Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke is told that under no circumstances should he investigate.

As the war approaches its end, Prince once more has to risk everything. Berlin, 1939: a German intelligence officer learns a top agent is quickly moving up the British Army ranks. He bides his time. Arnhem, 1944: British paratroopers have been slaughtered in one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War. A shell shocked officer is convinced that the Germans knew they were coming. But who betrayed them? Back in London, Richard Prince, detective and spy, is approached by MI5 about a counterintelligence operation.

A glittering French aristocrat is on the run, disguised as a British governess. England's top spy has a score to settle with her family. But as they're drawn inexorably into the intrigue and madness of Revolutionary Paris, they gamble on a love to which neither of them will admit.

Max Travers is an English teacher in Japan. When his manipulative boss begins swindling the unsuspecting parents of his students, Max must retrieve his passport to return home. Max sneaks into her office only to stumble upon a burglary in progress. Max barely escapes but accidentally takes a strange diary bound in leather and embossed with a strange seal. Little does Max know that this diary has been hidden for over half a century, and its secrets could topple some of Japan's most powerful people and rewrite the history of the royal family.

A neutral capital straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul has spent the war as a magnet for refugees and spies. Even American businessman Leon Bauer has been drawn into this shadow world, doing undercover odd jobs and courier runs for the Allied war effort. Now, as the espionage community begins to pack up and an apprehensive city prepares for the grim realities of postwar life, he is given one more assignment, a routine job that goes fatally wrong, plunging him into a tangle of intrigue and moral confusion.

It is 1961 in Berlin, and the Cold War is at its most chilling. Suave CIA agent Blackford Oakes has come to investigate.

German intelligence officer Captain Gregor Reinhardt has just been reassigned to the Feldjaegerkorps - a new branch of the military police with far-reaching powers. His position separates him from the friends and allies he has made in the last two years. And he needs them now more than ever. While retreating through Yugoslavia with the rest of the army, Reinhardt witnesses a massacre of civilians by the dreaded Ustaše - only to discover that there is more to the incident than anyone believes.

War crimes investigator and ex-CIA officer Joe Johnson is more than intrigued when he learns of a link between the financing for the presidential candidate's 2012 campaign, the Nazi train, and a ruthless blackmail plot. But the investigation becomes bigger and more deeply personal than Johnson expects when it turns out the SS Holocaust killer escaped his net years earlier. Soon, there are high-level intelligence agencies and criminal networks combining across three continents against Johnson and his two female colleagues.

On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Paris, 1962, Devereaux and Nordstrom uncover Soviet plans to ship nuclear arms. But when nobody acts after sharing his findings, Devereaux becomes the target of an assassination attempt and soon realizes the plot extends far beyond Cuba - and himself. A thrilling and well-paced novel filled with Cold War intrigue, Topaz features two agents on a journey around the world to save NATO and themselves.

John Lawton's A Lily of the Field is a brilliant historical thriller from a master of the form. The book follows two characters - Meret Voytek, a talented young cellist living in Vienna at the novel's start, and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. In his seventh Inspector Troy novel, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico and the rubble-strewn streets of postwar London, following the fascinating parallels of the physicist Szabo and musician Voytek as fate takes each far from home.

Berlin, 27 February 1933. A month after Hitler's inauguration as Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag parliament building is set ablaze. The Nazis use the torching to justify a campaign of terror against their political opponents. John Russell's recent separation from his wife threatens his right to reside in Germany and any meaningful relationship with his six-year-old son Paul. He has just secured work as a crime reporter for a Berlin newspaper, and the crimes which he has to report are increasingly entangled in the wider nightmare engulfing Germany.

When MI6 sends Evelyn Ainsworth back to Oslo, no one expects any complications, least of all Evelyn. With her identity locked down and her section classified, both her location and her mission are secure. Or so they thought. After months of inactivity and scattered warnings across Europe, Hitler finally moves, but not in the direction everyone expects. With tensions between England and Norway rising, the Führer seizes the opportunity to send an invasion force north—straight into Norway.