International Spy

Travelling through frozen North Norway, Ryker isn’t looking for trouble, but he has a habit of finding it. After a near miss on the road with a young moped driver, a local policeman assists the teenager and encourages Ryker on his way. But when Ryker travels to the nearby small town of Blodstein - only to be warded off by the locals when he asks questions about the boy he nearly killed - his instincts as a longtime intelligence agent fire.

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.

The plane carrying the Secretary of Defense is blown out of the sky. The Defense Intelligence Agency greenlights an unprecedented response - Operation: Sandblast. Pentagon Covert Ops runner Bridget Davenport, must find someone to infiltrate the Taliban, get to the terrorist mastermind, and at all costs stop his plan for an attack more destructive than 9/11. Bridget finds young California-raised Afghan-American Lieutenant Faraz Abdallah. His heritage and military training make him the perfect undercover agent, but no one knows whether he can do the job.

This astute, entertaining literary thriller features Helena Marsh, an art authenticator hot on the trail of an extorted painting in Budapest, skirting the law to return it to its rightful heir. When wealthy octogenarian Geza Marton hires art expert Marsh to buy back his family's Titian painting, she flies to Budapest to close what she expects will be a reasonably simple sale. But nothing is ever simple in this beautiful, flawed city where corruption abounds. Helena discovers that there are multiple bidders for the painting, including some dangerous Slavs.

The treaty is so simple that the American president can hardly believe his luck. In exchange for a few million tons of grain, the Russians, gripped by famine, will withdraw all troops and missiles from Eastern Europe. What’s more, this great success comes in an election year! It’s too good to be true—and something is about to go wrong.

Josef Bultova nearly died in a Russian prison camp. Once one of the Soviet Union’s most adept international negotiators, his work with the West grew so intimate that the suspicious Politburo exiled him to Siberia. The meager food, heavy work, and bitter cold took its toll, sapping his strength until, just as he was sure he could no longer go on, the Politburo let him go.

Adrian Dodds is a man without hobbies, friends, or family, who works a very peculiar job. Though he looks like a pencil pusher, he is a British counter-intelligence agent. In his own quiet, bureaucratic way, Dodds is vital to the security of the United Kingdom. His latest assignment is debriefing Viktor Pavel, a Soviet aeronautics genius who escapes his handlers to become the Cold War’s most high-profile defector.

One afternoon in Manhattan's Washington Square Park, Eric Mather is approached by two men, Tom and Jerry, with a business proposal: a bit of light espionage that may be considered treason. Eric's friend and colleague, physics professor Peter Bradley, is on his way back from an international conference in Athens. In his briefcase is a roll of film that must be confiscated to keep the Cold War from turning hot. Bradley won't miss this little roll of film, they say, and nobody will get hurt.

Savage, a former Navy SEAL and American state-of-the-art security specialist. Akira, Japan's most brilliant executive protector and a master of the samurai arts. Their mission: the retrieval of Rachel Stone, a beautiful American woman whose ruthless billionaire husband is out to destroy her.

Berlin, 1989. Protests across East Germany threaten the Iron Curtain and Communism is the ill man of Europe. Anne Simpson, an American who works as a translator at the Joint Operations Refugee Committee, thinks she is in a normal marriage with a charming East German. But then her husband disappears and the CIA and Western German intelligence arrive at her door. She had been targeted by the Matchmaker—a high-level East German counterintelligence officer who runs a network of Stasi agents.

Ryan Drake and his team are in hiding, having become sworn enemies of states and agencies around the world. But when a CIA operative and former adversary is killed in a car bomb attack, Drake is shocked to hear someone claiming responsibility using his name. Forced out of hiding by this mysterious new threat, Drake embarks alone on a dangerous and deadly search for answers; a journey that will take him from the slums of Rio to the deserts of Tunisia and the mountains of Afghanistan.

In the early hours of a quiet weekend morning in Manhattan's Diamond District, a brutal triple murder shocks the city. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs quickly take the case. Curiously, the killer has left behind a half-million dollars' worth of gems at the murder scene, a jewelry store on 47th street. As more crimes follow, it becomes clear that the killer's target is not gems but engaged couples themselves.

FBI agent Nicholas Drummond and his partner, Mike Caine, are deep into an investigation of COE - Celebrants of the Earth - a violent group known for widespread bombings of power grids and oil refineries across the country. While investigating a tip from a civilian who's overheard about a possible bombing plot, the Bayway Refinery in New Jersey explodes. Nicholas and Mike race to the scene and barely escape being killed by a secondary device.

Nothing good ever comes from a midnight phone call. For washed-up spy Harry Tower, it is the worst news at the worst possible time. His son, Sean, has gone missing in troubled Iran after writing an exposé about government corruption. Their relationship has never recovered since Harry's wife's suicide, for which Sean holds his father responsible. And Harry, with his career on the verge of disintegration, needs to find him and put things right.

A deadly fall on a rugged stretch of California coast. A burglary gone wrong in Virginia. These incidents seem unrelated, but the victims were living undercover, their true identities closely held secrets. They are members of a classified team, the last line of defense against foreign threats. Now someone is assassinating them one by one, taking out family members and innocent bystanders to make the deaths seem like accidents.

Rumor has it there's a Russian you can turn to if you're very rich, and need dirty deeds done without a trace. The CIA calls him Ivan the Ghost because he's operated for years without leaving a trail or revealing his face.

When the body of a radical protestor is found floating in one of Bologna's underground canals, it seems that most of the city is ready to blame the usual suspects: the police. But when private investigator Daniel Leicester, son-in-law to the former chief of police, receives a call from the dead man's lover, he follows a trail that begins in the 1970s and leads all the way to the rotten heart of the present-day political establishment.

Framed for murder and on the run, former Olympic biathlete Kyle Achilles is also in the crosshairs of assassins' guns. Why? He has no idea. He's fighting blind against two master strategists and one extraordinary invention - known as Brillyanc. Achilles' only ally is the other prime suspect, a beautiful Russian mathematician who is either the best or worst person to ever enter his life. Katya was engaged to Achilles' brother - before he died. Chasing clues while dodging bullets, Achilles and Katya race around the globe, uncovering a conspiracy.

Investigator Arkady Renko, the pariah of the Moscow prosecutor's office, has been assigned the thankless job of investigating a new phenomenon: late-night subway riders report seeing the ghost of Joseph Stalin on the platform of the Chistye Prudy Metro station. The illusion seems part political hocus-pocus and also part wishful thinking, for among many Russians, Stalin is again popular; the bloody dictator can boast a two-to-one approval rating.

Peru, the 1980s and 1990s: It was a cruel, bloody and terrifying era. The rebels of Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path"), founded by philosophy professor, Abimael Guzman, slaughtered vilagers in the mountains and hung dogs from power lines, their carcasses canvases for Maoist slogans. The government responded with a corrosive mix of assasination, bribery and intrigue which brought down the rebel leader but triggered the fall of the president.