Historical Mystery Spy

Deciding that true romantic heroes are a thing of the past, Eloise Kelly, an intelligent American who always manages to wear her Jimmy Choo suede boots on the day it rains, leaves Harvard's Widener Library bound for England to finish her dissertation on the dashing pair of spies the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian. What she discovers is something the finest historians have missed: a secret history that begins with a letter dated 1803.

Martin Cruz Smith has written nine previous novels featuring Arkady Renko, one of modern detective fiction’s most popular characters. These novels, beginning with 1981’s international sensation Gorky Park, have collectively traced Russia's evolution over the last half-century. Now, with Independence Square, Smith focuses on the fraught and frenzied days leading up to Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Journalist Tatiana Petrovna is on the move. Arkady Renko, iconic Moscow investigator and Tatiana’s part-time lover, hasn’t seen her since she left on assignment over a month ago. When she doesn’t arrive on her scheduled train, he’s positive something is wrong. No one else thinks Renko should be worried - Tatiana is known to disappear during deep assignments - but he knows her enemies all too well and the criminal lengths to which they’ll go to keep her quiet.

Im Januar 1944 halten vier Menschen das Schicksal der Welt in ihren Händen: ein amerikanischer Arzt, eine deutsche Krankenschwester, ein zionistischer Attentäter und eine junge jüdische Witwe. Im Auftrag des britischen Premierministers Winston Churchill sollen sie eine Mission erfüllen, die ihnen allen den Tod bringen kann. In einem Gefangenenlager in Mecklenburg arbeiten die Deutschen fieberhaft an der Herstellung von Giftgas, dessen Einsatz den Krieg entscheiden soll.

In spymaster Alan Furst's most electrifying thriller to date, Hungarian aristocrat Nicholas Morath, a hugely charismatic hero, becomes embroiled in a daring and perilous effort to halt the Nazi war machine in eastern Europe.

Occupied Munich, 1946: Irina, a Cossack refugee, confesses to murdering a GI, but American captain Harry Kaspar doesn't buy it. As Harry scours the devastated city for the truth, it leads him to his long-lost German brother, Max, who returned to Hitler's Germany before the war. Max has a questionable past, and he needs Harry for the cause that could redeem him: rescuing Irina's stranded clan of Cossacks who have been disowned by the Allies and are now being hunted by Soviet death squads - the cold-blooded upshot of a callous postwar policy.

BKA-Hauptkommissar Philipp Gerber ermittelt vor dem Hintergrund eines der wichtigsten Ereignisse der deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte: dem Mauerbau. August 1961. Auf dem Frankfurter Flughafen vereitelt BKA-Hauptkommissar Philipp Gerber in letzter Sekunde ein Attentat auf General Hiram C. Anderson, seinen ehemaligen Chef beim US-Militärgeheimdienst. Offiziell ist Anderson nach Deutschland zurückgekehrt, um mit seiner Tochter June durch das Land zu reisen, doch er verfolgt auch andere, politische Pläne. Und er will Philipp vor einem möglichen Doppelagenten und Landesverräter warnen.

Am 20. Juli 1944 sprengen die Verschwörer um Graf Stauffenberg den „Führer“ in die Luft. Doch dem Jubel über Hitlers Tod folgt gleich die Ernüchterung: Die Attentäter haben nicht genug Rückhalt in der Bevölkerung und bei der Wehrmacht. Ihre verzweifelte Lage zwingt sie zu einem Bündnis mit Heinrich Himmler und der SS. Im letzten Augenblick wendet Deutschland die Niederlage im Weltkrieg durch einen Atomschlag ab. Die Deutschen zwingen die Alliierten zu einem Frieden, der dem Reich die Grenzen vom April 1940 garantiert.

From the end of the 18th century, Americans traveled west to find new homes and new lands. They brought with them the magics of plain people. It is from these roots of the American dream that award-winning writer Orson Scott Card has crafted what the Charlotte Observer called "a uniquely American fantasy." Using the lore and the folk magic of the men and women who settled a continent, and the beliefs of the tribes who were here before them, Card has created an alternate frontier America.

In 1942, Jewish courier Ester is betrayed, narrowly avoiding arrest by the Gestapo. In a great haste, she escapes to Sweden, saving herself. Her family in Oslo, however, is deported to Auschwitz. In Stockholm, Ester meets the resistance hero Gerhard Falkum, who has left his little daughter and fled both the Germans and allegations that he murdered his wife, Åse, who helped Ester get to Sweden. Their burgeoning relationship ends abruptly when Falkum dies in a fire. And yet, 25 years later, Falkum shows up in Oslo. He wants to reconnect with his daughter.

Cyrus Barker, along with his former assistant and now partner Thomas Llewelyn, is the premier enquiry agent in all of 19th-century London, and beyond. They've thwarted the designs of villains and crooks off all sorts, helped Scotland Yard crack their most challenging cases, and worked for the Her Majesty's Government at the very highest levels. But nothing has been quite as challenging and dangerous as the latest case that comes to find them.

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.

Der junge Kommissar Sturm im brodelnden Berlin der Swinging Fifties. Im September 1957, kurz nach der Eröffnung der neuen Kongreßhalle, wird ein amerikanischer Journalist ermordet. Besonders brisant: Der Ermordete, der in Deutschland geboren ist, hatte auf Einladung der deutschen Regierung an den Feierlichkeiten teilgenommen. Der junge ungestüme Kommissar Jo Sturm wird auf den Fall angesetzt. Doch leider behindert sein Vorgesetzter seine Arbeit ständig. Und dann scheint sich auch noch die CIA brennend für seine Ermittlungen zu interessieren. Ein packender Kriminalroman in Zeiten des Kalten Krieges.

Summer, 1939. British journalist John Russell has just been granted American citizenship in exchange for agreeing to work for American intelligence when his girlfriend, Effi, is arrested by the Gestapo. Russell hoped his new nationality would let him safely stay in Berlin with Effi and his son, but now he’s being blackmailed. To free Effi, he must agree to work for the Nazis. They know he has Soviet connections and want him to pass them false intelligence. Russell consents, but secretly offers his services to the Soviets instead.

From the acclaimed author of The Night Portrait comes a stunning historical novel about two women, separated by 500 years, who each hide Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa - with unintended consequences.

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.

Im August 1953 tobt in Deutschland der heiße Wahlkampf zu den Bundestagswahlen am 6. September. Zu dieser Zeit trifft Philipp Gerber, 1933 mit Eltern und Geschwistern von Deutschland in die USA emigriert und im Zweiten Weltkrieg für den amerikanischen Militärgeheimdienst CIC tätig, in Bonn ein. Sein neuer Job in der Bundeshauptstadt: Kriminalhauptkommissar bei der Sicherungsgruppe Bonn, die zum BKA gehört. Seine Aufgabe: den Mordanschlag auf seinen Vorgänger Heinz Buchmann aufklären.

Julian Raines was one of the first Englishmen to volunteer for the international brigade in Spain. The British Secret Service suspect that the flamboyant Raines was recruited for the KGB by the Bolsheviks during his student days at Oxford and send Robert Florry, a struggling young writer to Spain after Raines with orders to eliminate him.

Europe, 1940. As war rages across the continent, America watches anxiously from the sidelines. And President Franklin Roosevelt has been keeping an even closer eye on developments in the Third Reich. At the president’s personal request, Lanny Budd gained the confidence of the Nazi high command and began transmitting valuable information back to the White House. Espionage is a dangerous game, however, and Presidential Agent 103 soon finds himself a target of the French Resistance fighters he is attempting to assist.

Since her husband, Josef, joined the Czech resistance three years ago, Anna Dankova has done everything possible to keep her daughter, Ema, safe. But when blonde haired, blue-eyed Ema is ripped from her mother’s arms in the local marketplace by the dreaded Brown Sisters, nurses who were dedicated to Hitler’s cause, Anna is forced to go to new extremes to take back what the Nazis have stolen from her. Going undercover as a devoted German subject eager to prove her worth to the Reich, the former actress takes on a role of a lifetime to find and save her daughter.