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Best spy novels of all time11/19/2023 ![]() ![]() Jean-Patrick Manchette, The n’Gustro Affair Silverview is a worthy coda to the most accomplished and ambitious career in espionage fiction. The result is a heady, entrancing story that suggests the world of intelligence and spygames is carrying on around us all the time, even in our small town bookshops. The mysterious encounter makes for a fascinating and befuddling clash, soon complicated further when the interactions bring attention from a senior intelligence officer. In le Carré’s last completed novel, a Londoner leaves the city behind to run a bookshop in a small coastal town, but soon encounters a mysterious presence there, a Polish émigré living in the town’s grand house, Silverview, who seems determined to insinuate himself into the other man’s interests. Lebedev is one of the leading voices in Russian literature, and Untraceable is both an impeccably plotted spy story and a stirring take on rising authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union and in the world at large. Bouisįor those of who have a tendency to romanticize the Soviet experience, Sergei Lebedev’s Untraceable is a great reminder that, now and in the past, strongmen, not revolutionary ideals, drove the use of secret weapons against dissenters. Translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Slough House is an exemplary addition to the series and one of the more unusual, rewarding spy stories to come out in some time. There’s simply nothing else like the Jackson Lamb novels in the contemporary fiction scene, and certainly nothing in the annals of espionage literature. They’ve always been out to pasture in Slough House, but with the coming of Brexit, the rise of populism, and the installment of a new, craven regime, washed out spies are for sale to the highest bidder, and it would seem that somebody has bid for the right to off them one-by-one. This time there’s a new, darker edge to the writing, and the spies’ fates are more precarious than ever. Mick Herron’s spy series somehow manages to keep pace with the wild (and wildly cynical) era of modern Britain. Berry deftly handles the situation’s competing loyalties and brings out an intense humanity in all her characters as they try to navigate an unimaginably difficult reckoning. ![]() What begins as an uncanny, uncertain recognition quickly spirals into a life altering conundrum. A young mother working in Belfast for the BBC sees news footage of a robbery performed by an underground offshoot of the IRA and recognizes in the grainy footage her own sister, supposedly on holiday on the coast. Elegant and elegiac, a paean to the Old Paris, or perhaps a Paris That Never Was, The Perfume Thief is perfectly pitched by the publisher as “ A Gentleman in Moscow meets Moulin Rouge.” –MOįlynn Berry’s Northern Spy is at once an intimate family portrait and a complex tableau of divided allegiances and ambitions in contemporary Northern Ireland. Clementine, or Clem, a septuagenarian perfume artist dressed impeccably in men’s clothes, is sent on a mission by her songbird client to retrieve a book of perfume recipes key to reuniting the chanteuse with her parfumier father, in hiding from the Nazis. This is the queer spy novel about WWII Paris that I never knew I needed and now could not possibly consider living without. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Vidich brings a keen observational eye to every character who moves through the pages of this vivid, compelling novel. In short, nobody can be trusted, everyone is suspected of double-crossing and subterfuge, and in the midst of it all they’re expected to pull off one of the most daring operations in the agency’s history. And the request is for another former defector, now working with the CIA, to lead the team. A senior KGB officer approaches the CIA with an eye toward defection, but he needs exfiltration from Moscow, a feat the CIA has never been able to pull off. The Mercenary ushers us into the intricate, erratic years of the Soviet Union’s final decline, when both sides viewed the other with heightened suspicion and every interaction seemed to be a ploy. Paul Vidich, among the very finest espionage novelists of the contemporary era, brings forward a stunner this year, with a deeply researched and deeply felt character study.
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