Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar
Written by Olga Wojtas — This time slip romp through imperial Russia has been published to coincide with the centenary of The Pride of Miss Jean…
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Need to Know
Written by Karen Cleveland — Debut author Karen Cleveland’s new spy thriller comes from a heartfelt place. She wrote it while on maternity leave when…
The Cossack
Written by KJ Lawrence — Though this debut espionage thriller kicks off with a murder in winter 2014, it’s not the usual intercontinental bloodbath. In fact,…
Cold
Written by John Sweeney — It’s an ordinary winter’s night in London and Joe Tiplady is out for a walk with his dog, Reilly. He soon…
Spy Out the Land
Written by Jeremy Duns — It might sound strange for a reviewer to describe rough, tough, bloodthirsty crime thrillers as their comfort zone, but it’s good to…
Child 44
Written by Tom Rob Smith — First published in 2008, Child 44 put Tim Rob Smith on the map as an author of taut, gritty crime…
Kolymsky Heights
Written by Lionel Davidson — Lionel Davidson and his thrillers have been unjustly neglected in recent years. He blazed a trail with articulate and complex international…
The Beast in the Red Forest
Written by Sam Eastland — The Inspector Pekkala series began in 2010 with The Eye of the Red Tsar and now reaches its fifth novel.…
A Morbid Habit
Written by Annie Hauxwell — If you had to create a check-list for a spy fiction heroine, then Catherine Berlin would not tick many boxes.…
Kill with a Borrowed Knife: or Agent Ai
Written by Michael Wreford — Plenty of spy and espionage stories focus on Europe and Russia, set mainly between the 1930s and the 1970s, when…
NTN: Chasing The Storm
Written by Martin Mölsted — It’s April, 2009, and on a peaceful spring afternoon in Hamburg, businessman Torgrim Rygg witnesses a woman being shot dead, and…
Tatiana
Written by Martin Cruz Smith — It’s over 30 years and six books since Arkady Renko first appeared in Gorky Park. In his exquisite first…
A classic revisited: Gorky Park
Ronald Reagan was steering his course to the White House when Gorky Park came out in 1980. Meanwhile, an ageing autocrat called Leonid Brezhnev, with…
Red Winter
Written by Dan Smith — Dan Smith’s previous novel The Child Thief, an intense thriller set among the Bolshevik-infested forests of 1930’s Ukraine, was one of…
The Twelfth Department
Written by William Ryan — Moscow, 1937, and the hand of Stalin’s empire lies heavily on every street, boulevard, public park, apartment block and factory…
The Distinguished Assassin
Written by Nick Taussig — While reading this novel about life in Stalin’s Soviet Russia, I was reminded very strongly of Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago.…