7 Espionage Thriller Books to Read Now

The first in a terrific series featuring CIA agent Tyler Wolf. Set at the start of the Cold War in a ruined Berlin that is being fought over by the Allies and the Soviets, Double Agent sees the rookie Wolf paired with a former-KGB officer who recently defected to the west. 

Anya Fedorov is as ruthless as she is beautiful. Wolf is mesmerised, but he’s also aware that she may be playing him. Is she a genuine opponent of Stalin, or a double planted by Moscow Central? 

The seductive game of cat-and-mouse that ensues will keep you reading long after you should be switching off the lights. Luckily, there are six more Tyler Wolf books to dig into when you have finished.

Strong’s memorable protagonist is a feisty Irish woman, Brianna Dagger, a CIA operative and parkour champion. 

The formidable Dagger needs all her well-honed agility and focus in her debut appearance in what we hope will be a long-running series. Europe has been sent into turmoil by the assassinations of leading politicians across the continent. 

Dagger is tasked with tracking down the ruthless killer as he moves from city to city, rooftop to roof top with his array of deadly weapons. Luckily for Dagger, leaping around high buildings is what she does for fun, though the sport she loves is never quite as dangerous as it is about to become. 

Irish patriot Childers had some experience as a gun-runner, and put his knowledge to good use in a book that helped establish the spy novel as a literary genre.

First published in 1903, The Riddle of the Sands features two upper-crust English yachtsmen, Charles Carruthers and Arthur Davies, who embark on a shooting expedition in northern Germany. The pair rumble a German plot to invade Britain across the North Sea and are determined to warn the government back home. 

Unfortunately for them, the Kaiser’s navy is soon on their trail. The pair must escape by sailing their slow little boat through treacherous waters. The Riddle of the Sands has been described, justifiably, as “The first modern thriller”.

Scots writer Buchan’s 1915 tale of derring-do sees his regular hero Richard Hannay — a former big game hunter who takes a predictably dim view of modern British life (because in Britain the past is always better than the present) — pursued across the Scottish Highlands by sinister foreign agents. 

These shadowy figures are desperate to get their hands on a codebook that a U.S. spy palmed to Hannay. 

The little book holds the secret to a black-hearted plot to derail the British effort to win World War One. Luckily Hannay — a definite prototype for James Bond — is a man of icy calm and iron jaw. He’s happy to engage in a solo battle to save the Empire. 

The novel has been filmed many times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935, when another war with Germany was looming.

Post Buchan, most British spy fiction was silly comic-book stuff often marred by racism and xenophobia. Eric Ambler, an advertising agency copywriter, set out to change all that. 

Inspired by the crime fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers, he created a series of masterful and realistic espionage thrillers that would inspire later writers such as John Le Carre, Len Deighton, and Chares McCarry. 

Set in a Europe brutalised by the Great Depression and the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin, The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), sees an ordinary man — mystery writer Charles Latimer — thrown into a world of conmen, gangsters, Nazis and corrupt officials, as he pursues the mysterious Dimitrios, a murderous gangster turned double agent, from the Black Sea to Paris. A geuine masterpiece.

Silva’s best-selling series featuring Gabriel Allon, an agent with Israeli intelligence, currently runs to 25 titles. 

This is the eighteenth book in the series and draws inspiration from the life of real-life British double agent Kim Philby who spent twenty years working for MI6 while secretly reporting to Moscow.  

In The Other Woman, one of Philby’s former lovers, a French woman he met in Beirut shortly before he escaped to Russia, comes into Allon’s orbit. She has a terrible tale from the past to tell. But, as Allon quickly deduces, it’s one with dangerous implications for the present.

Celebrated Scots detective writer Ian Rankin is best known for his Rebus crime series. In the 1990s, he wrote a memorable trilogy of spy novels under the pen name of Jack Harvey. 

In this cracking tale — the first in the series — former MI5 operative Dominic Elder comes out of retirement to hunt for a female terrorist assassin known only as “Witch” 3, a woman he has been obessessed with catching for decades. 

Teaming up with a couple of young male and female agents from England and France, Elder is soon trailing the killer across Europe. Complex, thrilling, and authentic, it leaves you hoping Rankin will one day return to the world of espionage.