Chuck Kelso is an idealist. When he steals a top-secret NATO memorandum, he only intends to leak it to the press; but it is soon in the hands of a Russian agent, a man who has spent nine years quietly working himself into the fabric of Washington society. Within hours it has reached the KGB, and the CIA’s top man in Moscow has had his cover blown. For British agent Tony Lawton, hunting down the Russian operative—the "agent in place"—is a welcome challenge. But for Chuck’s brother, the journalist Tom Kelso, and his beautiful wife, Thea, the affair has unleashed a very special terror.

Under the Mediterranean sun, a drama begins in a café in Málaga. For Ian Ferrier, an employee of the United States Space Agency on holiday to visit his old friend Jeff Reid, it means the startling discovery that Reid is not just a wine exporter, but rather engaged in smuggling communist defectors to the West. Events take a turn for the worse when Ferrier, a stranger to the deadly world of espionage, must take sole charge of a high-ranking KGB agent. Alone in an frighteningly alien landscape, he can afford no mistakes when choosing whom to trust …

Irina Kusak’s recently divorced husband, Jiri Hrádek, is a high-ranking official in the Czechoslovakian secret police: cruel, ambitious, utterly ruthless. So when he turns a blind eye to her defection to the West, she is uneasy. Aided in her escape by a group of friends, including David Mennery, an American with whom she once had a passionate affair, Irina begins to feel herself truly free. But soon their journey becomes a nightmare. It becomes clear that Hrádek only allowed Irina to defect in order to bait a trap for her father.

Just another routine overseas assignment. That’s what successful young New York architect Ken Strang thought when a national travel magazine sent him to Europe to sketch Greek ruins. What he did not know, until it was too late, was that from the moment he boarded the ship, he had become the pawn in a murderous game of international intrigue. To Strang, danger was no object. He could take care of himself, but he had reckoned without Cecilia, his beautiful photographer. When he fell in love with her, he gave his enemies the one weapon they needed.

While carrying out research in Paris, American historian John Craig is surprised when he runs into his old college professor. Sussman is a worried man. A survivor of Auschwitz, he in shock, having seen and been seen by one of the Nazis who tortured him in the camp. But SS Colonel Berg has been dead for 10 years—or has he? Before Craig can help solve the riddle, Sussman is found dead, and Craig is being questioned by the police. As various international organizations are drawn into the hunt for Sussman’s killer, he realizes the ex-Nazi is far more than just a wanted war criminal.

In 1945, with their thousand-year empire falling around them and the Allies on their heels, the Nazis hide a sealed chest in the dark, forbidding waters of the Finstersee—a lake surrounded by the brooding peaks of the Austrian Alps. There it lies for 21 years, almost forgotten, until a British agent decides to raise it from the depths. The secrets he uncovers are far-reaching and lethal, and in Salzburg, Bill Mathison, a New York attorney on the trail of a missing colleague, finds himself drawn into the shadowy underworld of international espionage.

British soldier Peter Lennox, a POW in an Italian prison camp, is still fighting his own war. An artist in civilian life, his hands bear the scars of wounds received during his capture at the fall of Tobruk, and he suspects he will never paint again. The only thing that sustains him is plotting his escapes, no matter how many times he is recaptured. But in September 1943 the Italians surrender to the Allies, and Lennox is free.

Paul Haydn was on his way home at last, to New York and the civilian life he longed for after years of war. Yet he would never forget the tormented people, desperate for refuge in Berlin. They had survived the war—but now a new, sinister presence threatened them, their families, the whole of society. Now he discovered that, back home, some of his former colleagues had dangerous political sympathies, that someone was trying to discredit the woman he had once loved. The pattern seemed suddenly familiar. He began to realize why there was such interest in his counter-propaganda skills.

A phone call prompts Bill Lammiter, a young American playwright, to follow a former girlfriend to Rome. There, Lammiter saves a mysterious Italian girl from a beating and the fat is in the fire. A kidnapping, a battle in a Renaissance villa, a shrewd gamekeeper, a chance snapshot and a touring preppy contribute to the excitement and suspense of this Cold War thriller.

Fenner burned Rosenfeld’s message, reminding himself wryly that he was behaving in the very best tradition. This was a game not too difficult to learn, he thought. A game? A game in deadly earnest. A vacation in Venice that was grim business. A girl constantly beside him who wasn’t his. How the hell had he walked into this upside-down world? Where, he wondered suddenly, would Venice lead?

He stared at the unfamiliar watch on his wrist. Three hours ago, he had stood on English soil. Three hours ago, he had been Martin Hearne, British Intelligence agent. Now he was in Nazi-occupied Brittany, posing as Bertrand Corlay, with the Frenchman’s life reduced to headings in his memory. Hearne looked down at the faded uniform, which had once been Corlay’s, felt once more for the papers in the inside pocket. He was ready. From now on, he was one step away from death.

English girl Sheila Matthews accepts an invitation to holiday in Poland, the country where her father died in mysterious circumstances. When German bombers begin pounding Warsaw, she decides against returning home and is recruited by the Polish underground. Playing a dangerous game as a double agent, Sheila must use all her skill to stay one step ahead of the Gestapo. But soon the Germans begin to suspect her and she flees to the forest, to be reunited with the enigmatic Captain Adam Wisniewski, now a wanted partisan.

In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal, but he grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante.

Henry Grey is a man who needs a change. His job as an office worker is as tedious as the women his mother sets him up with. His new job transporting thoroughbred racehorses to exotic international destinations should perk up his mundane existence. However, when he intercepts a cryptic message hidden in the bottom of a smuggled bottle of birth control pills, Grey learns that horses are not his only cargo.

The victory was hollow for Alan. He had been running a close second behind his good friend Bill Davidson, when Bill’s horse unexpectedly jerked as he soared over the steeplechase fence. Now, Bill was dead from his injuries, and Alan knew it wasn’t an accident. A small menacing thread of wire dangled from the top of the fence—a carefully constructed plot of malice. Curious, Alan begins an investigation that points to corruption that transcends the racing circuit—seeping into the town surrounding the track.

West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens for field agents and case officers amidst the dangerous milieu of a city in the grips of the Cold War. Helen's world is upended when, during her routine inspection of an agency property, she overhears a meeting between two unfamiliar people speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities far beyond her comprehension. Before the day is out, she witnesses a second unauthorized encounter, one that will place her in the sight lines of the most ruthless and powerful man at the agency.

In the vein of John le Carré and Graham Greene, this contemporary international thriller follows Milo Weaver as he is drawn into a conspiracy that links riots in the Sudan, an assassin committing suicide, and an old friend who's been accused of selling secrets to the Chinese. Once the CIA and Homeland Security are after him, the only way for him to survive is to return, headfirst, into Tourism.

The first audiobook which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos.Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man.

An unbearably tense novel of revenge, murder, bereavement and the destructive force of passion. The single-mother families of the isolated community under the shadow of the Pyderhorn, Bergen's greatest mountain, are being terrorised by a teenage gang. But teenage violence is nothing compared to what awaits detective Varg Veum when he gets to know the blue-eyed Wenche Andersen.

Sophie Duguet is losing her grip. Haunted by visions from her past of her loving husband, who committed suicide after a car accident. One morning she wakes to find Leo, the child in her care, strangled in his bed by Sophie's own shoelaces. She can remember nothing of the night before. Could she really have killed him? She flees in panic, but this only cements her guilt in the eyes of the law. Not long afterwards it happens again - she wakes with blood on her hands, with no memory of the murder committed.

When Finn, a former British spy, is poisoned by a Russian assassin, his ex-boss Adrian, chief of MI6, wants vengeance. He also wants answers - information that only Finn's widow, Anna, knows. Taken to America for protection and information, the former Russian agent faces her greatest test: to ensure her freedom and protect her child, she must uncover the full truth before anyone else - even as friend and foe both set her in their sights.

Now, for the first time, Herron’s short fiction has been collected into one volume. In Dolphin Junction, devoted fans and future converts alike will find much to amuse, delight, and terrify them. Five stand-alone nerve-racking and thrilling crime fiction stories are complemented by four mystery stories featuring the Oxford wife-and-husband detective team of shrewd Zoë Boehm and hapless Joe Silvermann. The collection also includes a peek into the past of Jackson Lamb, irascible top agent at Slough House.

After an eventful first few months in Provence, it seems Penelope is finally settling into her delightful new life, complete with a gorgeous love interest in the mayor of St. Merlot. When Penelope and the mayor attend a glamorous gallery opening, Penelope’s biggest worry is embarrassing herself in front of her date. But the evening takes a horrifying turn when a controversial expat painter, Roland Doncaster, chokes to death.

1942: a German spy comes ashore on a desolate stretch of Lincolnshire beach. But he is hunted down by a young detective, Richard Prince. The secret services have need of a man like him.... In occupied Europe, Denmark is a hotbed of problems for British intelligence. Rumours of a war-ending weapon being developed by the Germans are rife. Sent to Copenhagen, Prince is soon caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Dodging Gestapo agents, SS muscle and the danger of betrayal, his survival - and the war effort - hangs in the balance.

Auntie Poldi can think of no finer place to wait for death than Sicily. All she asks is a sea view, fine wine (and plenty of it), and her family close around. When death instead takes her handsome young friend Valentino - and under mysterious circumstances at that - Poldi will not take it lying down. Perhaps it's in her blood, but Auntie Poldi's hunting instincts have never felt more alive. Justice must be served - if it's the last thing she does....

When Navy Commander Robert Bellamy is assigned to investigate the crash of a NATO weather balloon near an isolated village in Switzerland, he is told that its cargo includes new and highly classified equipment. All witnesses to the accident should therefore be found and questioned.

When Jordan Sandor resigned from active service with the Central Intelligence Agency, it was before September 11th, before the fall of Saddam Hussein, and before the world had so dramatically changed. He is reluctantly drawn back into action when a series of violent events leads him to suss out a new al-Qaeda conspiracy to initiate cataclysmic assaults with poison gas.

When Gemma finds a rare and potentially valuable magazine hidden in the bookshop, she and her friend Jayne set off to find the owner, only to stumble upon a dead body. The highly perceptive Gemma is the police's first suspect, so she puts her consummate powers of deduction to work to clear her name, investigating a handsome rare books expert, the dead woman's suspiciously unmoved son, and a whole family of greedy characters desperate to cash in on their inheritance.

In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal, but he grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante.

New York Times bestselling author Alan Furst is widely recognized as master of the historical spy novel. Furst’s works are vivid evocations of long-forgotten heroes and feature plots that unfold to the inexorable cadence of history. Night Soldiers is a simultaneously thrilling and illuminating tale of espionage set in 1934.

Richard and Frances Myles are preparing for their annual European summer vacation in 1939 when they are visited at their Oxford college by old friend Peter Galt, who has a seemingly simple job for them. But in the heightened atmosphere of prewar Europe, nobody is above suspicion. In fact, the husband and wife are being carefully monitored by shadowy figures.

He stared at the unfamiliar watch on his wrist. Three hours ago, he had stood on English soil. Three hours ago, he had been Martin Hearne, British Intelligence agent. Now he was in Nazi-occupied Brittany, posing as Bertrand Corlay, with the Frenchman’s life reduced to headings in his memory. Hearne looked down at the faded uniform, which had once been Corlay’s, felt once more for the papers in the inside pocket. He was ready. From now on, he was one step away from death.

In 1945, with their thousand-year empire falling around them and the Allies on their heels, the Nazis hide a sealed chest in the dark, forbidding waters of the Finstersee—a lake surrounded by the brooding peaks of the Austrian Alps. There it lies for 21 years, almost forgotten, until a British agent decides to raise it from the depths. The secrets he uncovers are far-reaching and lethal, and in Salzburg, Bill Mathison, a New York attorney on the trail of a missing colleague, finds himself drawn into the shadowy underworld of international espionage.

Fenner burned Rosenfeld’s message, reminding himself wryly that he was behaving in the very best tradition. This was a game not too difficult to learn, he thought. A game? A game in deadly earnest. A vacation in Venice that was grim business. A girl constantly beside him who wasn’t his. How the hell had he walked into this upside-down world? Where, he wondered suddenly, would Venice lead?

A phone call prompts Bill Lammiter, a young American playwright, to follow a former girlfriend to Rome. There, Lammiter saves a mysterious Italian girl from a beating and the fat is in the fire. A kidnapping, a battle in a Renaissance villa, a shrewd gamekeeper, a chance snapshot and a touring preppy contribute to the excitement and suspense of this Cold War thriller.

English girl Sheila Matthews accepts an invitation to holiday in Poland, the country where her father died in mysterious circumstances. When German bombers begin pounding Warsaw, she decides against returning home and is recruited by the Polish underground. Playing a dangerous game as a double agent, Sheila must use all her skill to stay one step ahead of the Gestapo. But soon the Germans begin to suspect her and she flees to the forest, to be reunited with the enigmatic Captain Adam Wisniewski, now a wanted partisan.

Irina Kusak’s recently divorced husband, Jiri Hrádek, is a high-ranking official in the Czechoslovakian secret police: cruel, ambitious, utterly ruthless. So when he turns a blind eye to her defection to the West, she is uneasy. Aided in her escape by a group of friends, including David Mennery, an American with whom she once had a passionate affair, Irina begins to feel herself truly free. But soon their journey becomes a nightmare. It becomes clear that Hrádek only allowed Irina to defect in order to bait a trap for her father.

Chuck Kelso is an idealist. When he steals a top-secret NATO memorandum, he only intends to leak it to the press; but it is soon in the hands of a Russian agent, a man who has spent nine years quietly working himself into the fabric of Washington society. Within hours it has reached the KGB, and the CIA’s top man in Moscow has had his cover blown. For British agent Tony Lawton, hunting down the Russian operative—the "agent in place"—is a welcome challenge. But for Chuck’s brother, the journalist Tom Kelso, and his beautiful wife, Thea, the affair has unleashed a very special terror.

British soldier Peter Lennox, a POW in an Italian prison camp, is still fighting his own war. An artist in civilian life, his hands bear the scars of wounds received during his capture at the fall of Tobruk, and he suspects he will never paint again. The only thing that sustains him is plotting his escapes, no matter how many times he is recaptured. But in September 1943 the Italians surrender to the Allies, and Lennox is free.

American diplomat Payton Pleydell and his wife Sylvia are the most respected, brilliant couple in Washington. Theirs seems a perfect marriage, but Kate Jerold begins to suspect that her cousin’s husband is not as devoted as he seems. Then the unexpected arrival of a Czech official threatens to bring the façade crashing down. Even after six years apart, Sylvia has not forgotten Jan Brovic; during the war they had been deeply, secretly in love. But now there is a new war, and former allies have become bitter enemies. Jan is on the other side and his motives may not be pure.