My bookshelf·Index Reads like

spy novel

16 books

No. 0175 spy novel · Europe

Box 88

Charles Cumming

BOX 88 is a black-ops outfit run jointly by the British and the Americans, so far off the books that neither MI6 nor the CIA is sure it exists. Cumming runs two clocks. In 1989, Lachlan Kite is eighteen, a…

Read the entry
Box 88
No. 0444 spy novel · England

Clown Town

Mick Herron

Ninth in the Slough House run, where MI5 parks the agents it can’t fire — bad spies serving out their careers shuffling paper under Jackson Lamb, who is filthy, cruel, and smarter than everybody. (Praise baby Jesus for Gary Oldman’s…

Read the entry
Clown Town
No. 0217 novel · Europe

Creation Lake

Rachel Kushner

Sadie Smith is a hired spy — ex-federal, now freelance, working for clients she never meets. Her job is to get inside a commune of radical farmers in southwest France and push them into doing something illegal enough to jail…

Read the entry
Creation Lake
No. 0165 spy novel · Africa

Gabriel’s Moon

William Boyd

Gabriel Dax writes travel books and doesn’t sleep. A fire took his mother and the family house when he was six, and he’s been dreaming it every night since. In August 1960, he’s in Léopoldville in the DRC and lands…

Read the entry
Gabriel’s Moon
No. 0176 spy novel · Europe

Judas 62

Charles Cumming

The second Lachlan Kite spy book, and it splits the same way the first one did. In 1993, Kite is a young officer sent into post-Soviet Russia under cover as an English teacher, running an exfiltration of a bioweapons scientist…

Read the entry
Judas 62
No. 0177 spy novel · Europe

Kennedy 35

Charles Cumming

This is the third Lachlan Kite spy novel. In 1995, he’s sent to West Africa to catch a war criminal from the Rwandan genocide, an operation that gets people killed and leaves a debt. In the present, the same man…

Read the entry
Kennedy 35
No. 0192 spy novel · Caribbean

Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene

Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in Havana, has a teenage daughter with expensive tastes, and no money. The British intelligence service recruits him to spy, but having nothing to report, and no spying experience, he invents a network of agents out…

Read the entry
Our Man in Havana
No. 0233 spy novel · Europe

Palace of Treason

Jason Matthews

Dominika is back in Moscow, promoted, and now spying for the Americans from inside the SVR while being personally noticed by Putin, who appears as himself throughout. The operational thread runs to Vienna and to an Iranian nuclear program, and…

Read the entry
Palace of Treason
No. 0234 spy novel · Europe

Red Sparrow

Jason Matthews

Dominika Egorova is a ballerina whose career ends with an injury, and her uncle in Russian intelligence gets her into Sparrow School, where the state trains officers in seduction as tradecraft. Her assignment is a young CIA officer in Helsinki…

Read the entry
Red Sparrow
No. 0232 spy novel · Europe

The Kremlin’s Candidate

Jason Matthews

The last of the Dominika Egorova spy trilogy, finished as Matthews was dying. Russian intelligence has a mole of its own, in place for decades and about to be appointed to run the CIA, and double-agent Dominika is the only…

Read the entry
The Kremlin’s Candidate
No. 0210 novel · No fixed address

The Laughing Monsters

Denis Johnson

Roland Nair, a Danish-American with a NATO intelligence job and a private agenda, flies into Freetown to meet his old friend Michael Adriko, a Ugandan special forces soldier who is charming, unreliable, and possibly running a scam involving enriched uranium.…

Read the entry
The Laughing Monsters
No. 0163 spy novel · Asia

The Peacock and the Sparrow

I.S. Berry

Shane Collins is fifty-two, divorced, twenty-five years in the CIA, and finishing his career in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, chasing evidence of Iranian support for the Shia uprising that his bosses in Washington badly want to exist. He’s tired,…

Read the entry
The Peacock and the Sparrow
No. 0193 novel · Asia

The Quiet American

Graham Greene

It’s Saigon in the early fifties, the French war going badly. Fowler is a British reporter, middle-aged, opium in the afternoons, living with a young Vietnamese woman named Phuong and determined to have no opinions about anything. Pyle is a…

Read the entry
The Quiet American
No. 0208 spy novel · Europe

The Secret Hours

Mick Herron

A standalone in the literary spy world of Slough House. A pointless government inquiry called Monochrome has been given a windowless room and no real powers, and two civil servants have spent two years finding nothing — until a classified…

Read the entry
The Secret Hours
No. 0195 spy novel · Europe

The Third Man

Graham Greene

Vienna after the war, the city carved into four occupation zones and half of it rubble. Rollo Martins, a broke writer of pulp westerns, arrives to take a job from his old friend Harry Lime and finds Lime’s funeral instead.…

Read the entry
The Third Man
No. 0212 spy novel · Europe

To Catch a Spy

Stuart M. Kaminsky

Toby Peters is a broke Los Angeles private detective in the 1940s whose specialty is doing quiet jobs for movie stars. In this one the client is Cary Grant, being blackmailed with a photograph and tangled up in wartime counterintelligence…

Read the entry
To Catch a Spy