International Spy

"If, on an early summer’s night, you wanted to kill a man, how would you do it? Would you lay a trap, sharpen a dagger, uncork a poison? Personally, I’ve always leaned toward the dramatic. But looking back, I wonder now if the events of last summer didn’t begin with a quieter sort of murder." So ponders Alexandra James, a beautiful, driven, yet troubled New England Chronicle reporter. She is assigned to cover the death of Thom Carlyle, son of one of the most powerful men in Washington. Just back from a year abroad, Thom falls from the top of a Harvard bell tower on a warm summer night.

Transilvania, XXI secolo. Il caustico e ironico professor Charles Baker dell'Università di Princeton si trova nella città natale del principe delle tenebre, Vlad III l'Impalatore, meglio noto come il conte Dracula, e sta prendendo parte a una conferenza insieme ai più importanti storici del mondo, quando il suo discorso è bruscamente interrotto dall'improvviso, quanto sgradevolissimo, arrivo delle autorità locali. Tre omicidi raccapriccianti richiedono la sua immediata presenza sul luogo del delitto. Tre corpi messi in posa a formare una croce giacciono sulla scalinata degli Scolari.

"And should you die, take pride that you were fortunate enough to die for the Division." With that cheery bit of encouragement, newly promoted Agent Katrina Foster is tossed onto a plane and sent halfway around the world on her first assignment. Her directive: uncover who killed the country's top agent. When Katrina links the murder to a decade-old political assassination, a murderous mastermind, and a shadowy organization set on global disruption, she becomes a target.

When a senator's wife and teenage daughter are kidnapped, Thomas Crocker and SEAL Team Six are sent to Mexico's lawless countryside, where federal agents protect instead of hunting down violent narcotics kingpins. The two women have been kidnapped by the Jackal, a drug lord drunk on power and influence. He also happens to be a self-styled modern Che Guevara, who has undergone plastic surgery to disguise his looks and justifies his brutal methods and Machiavellian drug empire with the politics of social revolution.

Why was Dr. Robert Magnusson murdered? More to the point, why was he murdered 500 miles from anywhere, in the frozen wilderness of Greenland? And then there is the question of what he was doing 70 miles north of the UCLA base camp, where he should have been—and what were the instruments he had secretly set up and housed in the shack out there?

Off the coast of South Korea, a young boy discovers a cave soaked in human blood. Less than a week later, everyone in his village disappears. In Saudi Arabia, a female archaeologist unearths an artifact that threatens the very foundation of Islam. To some, it is a discovery that must be silenced at all costs.

Reeling from the aftermath of a rogue CIA plot to destroy Moscow, the United States is caught unprepared when foreign hackers launch a cyber-attack on the Strategic Early Warning System. With the CIA in shambles, the President turns to ex-intelligence analyst Kurt Vetter and his mysterious partner Amanda Carter to hunt down the hackers and bring them to justice. Little do they know this is the easy part...

The terrifying, lengthening list of Russia’s use of lethal poisons against its critics has inspired acclaimed author Sergei Lebedev’s latest novel. With uncanny timing, he examines how and why Russia and the Soviet Union have developed horrendous neurotoxins. At its center is a ruthless chemist named Professor Kalitin, obsessed with developing an absolutely deadly, undetectable, and untraceable poison for which there is no antidote. But Kalitin becomes consumed by guilt over countless deaths from his Faustian pact to create the ultimate venom.

When American covert operative Chase Fulton finally believes his life has become as close to normal as it will ever be, he finds himself in a magnificent anchorage in the Bahamas with his beautiful, new wife on the first night of their honeymoon. But as the sun melts across the western horizon, his dream vacation is thrown into chaos when a mega yacht races into the harbor at full speed, bearing directly on his catamaran. After narrowly surviving the collision, it soon becomes obvious the episode was no accident.

Former Budapest cop Attila Feher would really like to see art expert Helena Marsh again, so he arranges a contract for her to determine whether a painting is a copy of a famous Artemisia Gentileschi canvas or the real thing. A simple appraisal becomes a dangerous assignment when usual eastern European gangsters show up and people start dying and the seething corruption that underlies the lost promise of post-Soviet Hungary swirls to the surface. In a race to get to the truth and to outwit her adversaries, Helena and Attila must solve the mystery of the painting’s origins.

Clive Franklin, a Russian language expert in the Foreign Office, is summoned unexpectedly to Moscow to act as translator for the British Prime Minister. His life is upended when he discovers that his former lover, Marina Volina, is the interpreter to the Russian President. Together they will try to stop the attack that could paralyse communications and collapse the Western economy.

Lucas Benes faces his greatest challenge yet when he finds a secret message from his mother hidden inside a sunken cargo container. In a near-death scuba diving experience, Lucas and the new resistance kids learn that Good Company CEO Siba Günerro - along with her newest and most beautiful Curukians is planning a massive art heist. Lucas and friends scour the Spanish countryside looking for clues. But to unravel the mysteries of both the robbery and the cryptic message, Lucas must first discover the only thing that is worth more than priceless.

Quinn Mitchell is a nine-to-five spy - an intelligence analyst for the CIA during the day, and a suburban wife and mother on evenings and weekends. After her young daughter is killed in a tragic accident, sending her life into a tailspin, Quinn hopes to find a new start in her latest assignment: investigating a series of bizarre international assassinations whose victims have been found with numeric codes tattooed, burned, or carved into their flesh.

Nearly being indicted convinced Benn Bluestone to quit drug lawyering. Now he just wants to sleep well and turn an honest buck. A case as trustee for an unstable young woman seems like just the ticket…but this ride began in World War II, continued through the Golden Triangle heroin trade, navigated a serpentine trail of spies and international corruption, and ended up on a remote South China Sea atoll, where nuclear war between the United States and China threatens to destroy the world. Now Benn has no choice but to draw on the maneuvers of the past he escaped.

It is 1992 in Warsaw, Poland, and the communist era has just ended. A series of grisly murders suddenly becomes an international case when it's feared that the victims may have been couriers smuggling nuclear material out of the defunct Soviet Union. The FBI sends an agent to help with the investigation. When he learns that a Russian physicist who designed a portable atomic bomb has disappeared, the race is on to find him - and the bomb - before it ends up in the wrong hands.

Sulick reveals six fundamental elements of espionage in these stories: the motivations that drove them to spy; their access and the secrets they betrayed; their tradecraft, i.e., the techniques of concealing their espionage; their exposure; their punishment; and, finally, the damage they inflicted on America's national security.

On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union just weeks before a peace summit between the two nations. The CIA concocted a cover story for President Eisenhower to deliver, assuring him that no one could have survived a fall from that altitude. But against all odds, pilot Francis Gary Powers emerged from the wreckage and was seized by the KGB. Award-winning journalist Monte Reel reveals how the U-2 spy program, principally devised by four men working in secret, upended the Cold War and carved a new mission for the CIA.

At a luxury resort on the coast of Uruguay, Jessica Petrovich and a select team of Black Flagged operatives prepare to kill Dr. Anatoly Reznikov, the elusive bioweapons scientist responsible for designing and selling a lethal virus to America's enemies. At the same time, a Mossad assassination cell moves on a Russian mafiya boss believed to have offered Reznikov's bioweapons to the Iranians.

James Donovan and his counter terrorism team find themselves knee-deep in a foreign conspiracy that began with a murder at the United Nations in New York. Going undercover at the UN, his first job is to safeguard the Chinese Ambassador Madam Woo and her aide-de-camp, as well as protect the British Ambassador from unknown African assailants.

In this fascinating account, cultural historian Kathy Peiss reveals how book and document collecting became part of the new apparatus of intelligence and national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. Focusing on the ordinary Americans who carried out these missions, she shows how they made decisions on the ground to acquire sources that would be useful in the war zone as well as on the home front.