Historical Mystery Spy

A neutral capital straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul has spent the war as a magnet for refugees and spies. Even American businessman Leon Bauer has been drawn into this shadow world, doing undercover odd jobs and courier runs for the Allied war effort. Now, as the espionage community begins to pack up and an apprehensive city prepares for the grim realities of postwar life, he is given one more assignment, a routine job that goes fatally wrong, plunging him into a tangle of intrigue and moral confusion.

Meet the Williamson sisters, Britain’s most treasured World War II veterans. Now in their late nineties, Josephine and Penny are in huge demand, popping up at commemorative events and history festivals all over the country. Despite their age, they’re still in great form—perfectly put together, sprightly and sparky, and always in search of their next “excitement.” This time it’s a trip to Paris to receive the Légion d’honneur for their part in the liberation of France. And as always, they will be accompanied by their devoted great-nephew, Archie.

October 1945: The Germans and Japanese have surrendered. For Cletus Frade and his colleagues in the OSS, it should be time to pack up - but they have far more important things to do. Chief among them is the protection of their assets, especially the human ones. In the closing months of the war, the United States made a secret deal with the head of German intelligence’s Soviet section. In exchange for a treasure trove of intelligence - in particular the identity of the Soviet spies in the U.S. atomic bomb program - his people would be spirited to safety in Argentina.

In 1939, as the armies of Europe mobilized for war, the British secret services undertook operations to impede the exportation of Roumanian oil to Germany. They failed. Then, in the autumn of 1940, they tried again.... So begins Blood of Victory, a novel rich with suspense, historical insight, and the powerful narrative immediacy we have come to expect from best-selling author Alan Furst.

Meurtres en Alabama. Birmingham, Alabama, 1963. Le corps sans vie d'une fillette noire est retrouvé. La police s'en préoccupe de loin. Mais voilà que d'autres petites filles noires disparaissent... Bud Larkin, détective privé bougon, alcoolique et raciste, accepte d'enquêter pour le père de la première victime. Adela Cobb, femme de ménage noire, jeune veuve et mère de famille, s'interroge : "Les petites filles, ça disparaît pas comme ça..." Deux êtres que tout oppose. A priori.

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.

As Europe slides toward war, the faculty of a midwestern university fight a crusade of their own - the campaign against Communism. The local publishing magnate has accused economics professor Jonathan Hogan of being a Red, and the scholar is forced to defend himself in front of the university's elders. They spare him, for Hogan is no Communist - merely a free thinker, open and honest in an age when conformity is the norm.

Vienna, 1954 After losing everyone she loves in the final days of World War II, Ingrid Bauer agrees to a hasty marriage with a gentle Soviet embassy worker and follows him home to Moscow. But nothing within the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime is what it seems, including her new husband, whom Ingrid suspects works for the KGB. Inspired by her daughter’s birth, Ingrid risks everything and reaches out in hope to the one country she understands and trusts—Britain, the country of her mother’s birth. She begins passing intelligence to MI6, navigating a world of secrets and lies, light and shadow.

Hollywood, 1945. Ben Collier has just arrived from war-torn Europe to find his brother has died in mysterious circumstances. Why would a man with a beautiful wife, a successful movie career, and a heroic past choose to kill himself?

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.

The library holds not only hidden knowledge but also the most unsettling secret the world has ever known, a secret the Templars hope to use to control humankind's destiny. Five keys are needed to access the library-to find them, Ezio must travel to the troubled city of Constantinople, where a growing army of Templars threatens to destabilize the Ottoman Empire.Walking in the footsteps of his predecessor, Altaïr, Ezio must defeat the Templars for the final time. The stakes have never been higher, and what started as a pilgrimage has become a race against time.

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.

Special Agent Paul Chavasee is about to start a much-deserved holiday when he is abruptly pulled back to active duty. He knows that if he's being called into action, a job has gone bad - and it's about to get a lot worse. As Hitler's private secretary - and an influential member of the Third Reich - Martin Bormann was one of those rare Nazis who managed to simply disappear at the end of World War II. But the terrible secrets Bormann carried into oblivion are about to be revealed to the world. A manuscript that exposes former Nazis, who are now in hiding, is up for grabs, and there are those in power who have much to lose with its discovery.

Many people have fled the city, and those who stayed behind find themselves thrown together in an odd intimacy born of crisis. Stella Rodney is one of those who chose to stay. But for her, the sense of impending catastrophe becomes acutely personal when she discovers that her lover, Robert, is suspected of selling secrets to the enemy, and that the man who is following him wants Stella herself as the price of his silence. Caught between these two men, not sure whom to believe, Stella finds her world crumbling as she learns how little we can truly know of those around us.

Love. Violence. Destiny. These powerful themes ricochet through Lorenzo Carcaterra's new novel like bullets from a machine gun. In Gangster, he surpasses even his best-selling Sleepers to create a brutal and brilliant American saga of murder, forgiveness, and redemption.

John Russell, an English journalist who specializes in human-interest pieces, had always been a reluctant spy. It’s a dangerous life—especially when you are tasked with being a double agent for Soviet and American intelligence, in a city as fraught with hazard as Nazi-occupied Berlin. But it’s been years, now, since Russell was finally able to extricate himself from his life of espionage—through a shady deal with a high-ranking Soviet official. Now it’s 1953, and Russell and his family live a life of relative comfort in Los Angeles.

It’s London, the Swinging '60s, and by all rights, MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, his postings are more grim than glamorous. Luckily, Wilderness has a knack for doing well for himself even in the most unpromising postings - though this has gotten him into hot water in the past. A coffee-smuggling gig in divided Berlin was a steady money-maker, but things went pear-shaped when he had to smuggle a spy back to the KGB instead.

October 1942: it’s been two years since Kate Rees was sent to Paris on a British Secret Service mission to assassinate Hitler. Since then, she has left spycraft behind to take a training job as a sharpshooting instructor in the Scottish Highlands. But her quiet life is violently disrupted when Colonel Stepney, her former handler, drags her back into the fray for a dangerous three-pronged mission in Paris.

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.

She's braved battlefields. She's stolen dispatches from under the noses of heads of state. She's played the worldly courtesan, the naive virgin, the refined British lady, even a Gypsy boy. But Annique Villiers, the elusive spy known as the Fox Cub, has finally met the one man she can't outwit... British spymaster Robert Grey must enter France and bring back the brilliant, beautiful - and dangerous - Fox Cub. His duty is to capture her and her secrets for England.