Historical Mystery Spy

Alan Furst's latest novel takes place in the secret hotels, nightclubs, and cafes of occupied Paris and the villages of France during the spring of 1941, when Britain was losing the war. Many of the characters are resistance fighters who run an escape line for British airmen down to Spain; they include men and women, old and young, all strong - an aristocrat, a Jewish teacher - and the hero is a hero, has a gun, and uses it.

May 1941. At four in the morning, a rust-streaked tramp freighter streams up the Tagus River to dock at the port of Lisbon. She is the Santa Rosa; she flies the flag of neutral Spain and is in Lisbon to load cork oak, tinned sardines, and drums of cooking oil bound for the Baltic port of Malmo. Only she is not the Santa Rosa, she is the Noordendam, a Dutch freighter that sails for the Intelligence Division of the British Royal Navy....

London, December 1943. As the Russian army repels German forces from Stalingrad, Maggie Hope takes a much-needed break from spying to defuse bombs in London. But Maggie herself is an explosion waiting to happen. Traumatized by her past, she finds herself living dangerously - taking huge risks, smoking, drinking, and speeding through the city streets on a motorbike. The last thing she wants is to get entangled in another crime.

It is the spring of 1945, and in a dusty, remote community, the world’s most brilliant minds have come together in secret. Their mission: to split an atom and end a war. But among those who have come to Robert Oppenheimer’s "enchanted campus" of foreign-born scientists, baffled guards, and restless wives is a simple man in search of a killer. Michael Connolly has been sent to the middle of nowhere to investigate the murder of a security officer on the Manhattan Project.

Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to the Tudor Queen Elizabeth has trained Kit Scarlett since she was a girl. Aware that she is able to infiltrate places that his male agents cannot, he sees her as an invaluable member of his team. When Walsingham discovers that a rebel alliance is planning to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and put Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne, he summons Kit immediately. Together with loyal Scottish agent Iomhar Blackwood, Kit is tasked with finding out the full details of the treasonous plot.

A series of baffling murders among a group of imprisoned agents threatens the outcome of World War II in this chilling mystery from the New York Times best-selling author of Mr. Churchill’s Secretary. World War II is raging, and former spy Maggie Hope knows too much. She knows what the British government is willing to do to keep its secrets. She knows the real location of the planned invasion of France. She knows who’s lying. She knows who the double-crossers are. She knows exactly who is sending agents to their deaths.

London, 1921: Ex-Secret Service spy Jack McColl is in prison serving time for assaulting a cop. McColl has been embittered by the Great War. He can't stomach spying for the British Empire anymore. He's also heartbroken. The love of his life, radical journalist Caitlin Hanley, parted ways with him three years earlier so she could offer her services to the Communist revolution in Moscow. Then his former Secret Service boss offers McColl the chance to escape his jail sentence if he takes a dangerous and unofficial assignment in Russia, where McColl is already a wanted man.

The Battle of the Atlantic is at its peak. Packs of German U-boats are hunting and sinking U.S. supply ships. Ships are burning at their moorings in U.S. ports, and a series of explosions has afflicted trains and train stations around the country - is it all accidental or is it sabotage? As World War II heats up, "Wild Bill" Donovan's agents - answerable only to Donovan and the president - suddenly find themselves battling on two fronts at once.

In the autumn of 1938, Germany's reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, is growing frustrated at the British using their regional power in India to block the passage of an SS expedition to Tibet. Determined to spite them, he plots to steal something the British hold dear and have failed for the seventh time that spring to achieve: a first summit of Mount Everest. Seventy years later, seasoned mountain guide Neil Quinn's ninth visit to the top of the world's highest mountain, this time in charge of the 16-year-old son of a Long Island billionaire, begins to unravel.

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.

To solve this case, only an outsider will do...Ingo Finch faces his biggest challenge yet. New York, 1904 - over a thousand are dead after the sinking of the General Slocum, a pleasure steamer full of German immigrants out for a day on the East River. The community is devastated, broken, in uproar. With a populist senator preying on their grievances, a new political force is unleashed, pushing America to ally with Germany in any coming war. Nine months later, Ingo Finch arrives in Manhattan, now an official British agent.

On his wedding day in 1976, Viktor Moroz stumbles upon a murder scene: two gay men, one of them a US official, are axed to death in Moscow. Viktor, a Jewish refusenik, is stuck in Russia due to the government’s denial of his application to leave for Israel; he sits “in refusal” alongside his wife and their community of intellectuals, Jewish and not. But then the KGB spots Viktor leaving the murder scene. Plucked off the street, he’s given a choice: find the real murderer or become the suspect of convenience.

Lily Saint James grew up traveling the European continent, learning languages as she went. In 1938, her mother's abrupt death brings her back home to Washington, DC, and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Lily comes to the attention of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Her knowledge of German, French, and Italian makes her the perfect OSS Agent, and her quick thinking places her as a nanny in the household of an important German Army Colonel, where she is able to gather intelligence for the Allies.

February, 1586. When the queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, learns that Ursula is to visit her relatives in Devon, he asks her to find out what has happened to two of his local agents, who have been strangely silent recently. On arrival in the small Devon village of Zeal Aquatio, Ursula discovers that both spies in question have met with mysterious - and fatal - accidents. Or is there more to it than that? What did the two spies find out that got them killed?

Milan, 1492: When a 16-year-old beauty becomes the mistress of the Duke of Milan, she must fight for her place in the palace—and against those who want her out. Soon, she finds herself sitting before Leonardo da Vinci, who wants to ensure his own place in the palace by painting his most ambitious portrait to date. Munich, World War II: After a modest conservator unwittingly places a priceless Italian Renaissance portrait into the hands of a high-ranking Nazi, she risks her life to recover it, working with an American soldier, part of the famed Monuments Men team, to get it back.

Evelyn Ainsworth is just coming to terms with the sudden death of her father when an unexpected meeting in London exposes family secrets, changing everything she thought she knew. Faced with the task of traveling to Oslo to meet with a double agent, it’s time for the new MI6 agent to show her worth. But nothing can prepare her for what awaits her in the streets of Norway. Caught between a ruthless SS agent and the Soviet NKVD, Evelyn races to stay one step ahead of an enemy who seems to know her every move.

Ghost Station is a tense thriller about espionage, cryptography, and paranoia, set in the earliest days of the Berlin Wall. Can Reed trust Longshore? His boss? His lover? Can he find the truth behind the lies - or will Berlin become ground zero for a world-ending war?

When former MI6 agent turned archaeologist Dr Ava Curzon is engaged by American intelligence to track down an African militia claiming to hold the Ark of the Covenant, she is plunged into a world where nothing is what it seems. Her breakneck descent into the shadowy realm of dark biblical magic hurls her across continents and into the opaque worlds of the Knights Templar, freemasons, occultists and extremist neo-Nazis, pushing her mentally and physically to the limits.

In the fall of 1941, Anglo-American journalist John Russell is still living in Berlin, tied to the increasingly alien city by his love for two Berliners: his 14-year-old son, Paul, and his longtime girlfriend, Effi. Forced to work for both German and American Intelligence, he's searching for a way out of Germany. Can he escape and take Effi with him?

The North Sea, October 1904 - When Russian warships bombard the Hull trawler fleet, killing innocent fishermen, public outrage pushes Britain and Russia to the brink of war, the sparks from which could inflame the entire continent. Doctor Ingo Finch, once of the Royal Army medical corps, is long done with military adventuring. But when a stranger seeks him out, citing a murderous conspiracy behind the infamous 'Dogger Bank Incident', Finch is drawn back into the dark world of espionage.