Showing titles in Spies & Politics

Twenty years ago, ornithology student Jessica Weston filmed a lyrebird mimicking the dying screams of a woman in the Barrington Tops National Park. Terrified, she took her recordings to the Maitland police to report a murder. Despite support from newly minted detective, Megan Blaxland, no one was reported missing in the area and no body found, so Jessica's claims were mocked and dismissed. Twenty years later, a body is unearthed. Exactly where Jessica said it would be.

When high school English teacher Alice Thornton helps her dying Russian neighbor write a spy thriller, she thinks she’s just doing a good deed. But when a sexy mystery man shows up in her classroom, claiming to be the novel’s dashing antihero, Alice is swept into a lethal conspiracy. Enigmatic former CIA operative Carter Beck warns her that the sensational murder plot wasn’t fiction. And because she knows too much, the killer wants her silenced—making Carter her only hope of survival.

Do you need my help? It was always the first question he asked. They called him when they had nowhere else to turn. Raised and trained as part of a top-secret programme, he was sent to the worst places in the world to do things his government denied any knowledge of. Then he broke with the programme and disappeared. But now someone's on his tail. Someone who knows he was once known simply as Orphan X.

A winter sunrise over the great plains of Russia is no cause for celebration. The temperature barely rises above zero, and the guards at Penal Colony IK22 are determined to take their misery out on the prisoners—chief among them, one Zoya Zakharova. Once a master spy for Russian foreign intelligence, then the partner and lover of the Gray Man, she has information the Kremlin wants, and they don't care what they have to do to get it.

Accompanying celebrated academic, Katherine Solomon, to a lecture she’s been invited to give in Prague, Robert Langdon’s world spirals out of control when she disappears without trace from their hotel room. Far from home and well out of his comfort zone, Langdon must pit his wits against forces unknown to recover the woman he loves. But Prague is an old and dangerous city, steeped in folklore and mystery. For over two thousand years, the tides of history have washed back and forth over it, leaving behind echoes of everything that has gone before.

An assassin’s bullet. A deadly conspiracy. But who is calling the shots? When an attempted assassination sparks a chain reaction of explosive events across London, Britain’s elite security forces seem powerless to stop the chaos threatening to overwhelm the government. As the dark and deadly conspiracy unfolds, three strangers find their fates entwined: Joe Dempsey, a deadly military intelligence officer; Sarah Truman, a CNN reporter determined to get her headline; and Michael Devlin, a Belfast-born criminal barrister with a secret past.

On a sullen, cloudy July day ten years since 7/7, the happy, confident and optimistic British Prime Minister is visiting a charity in East London. It's just two months after the general election which saw John Campbell's government returned to power with a clear majority, the economy is on the mend and the coalition is fast becoming a bad memory. Suddenly, a man appears out of the crowd and shoots him three times in the chest.

Just before the Tet Offensive changes the dynamic in Vietnam, before President Johnson announces he will not run for reelection, before the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, as riots and protests rage across the nation, a spy ship, the USS Pueblo, is captured by communist forces off the coast of North Korea. The crew thought they had destroyed everything of intelligence value. They were wrong.

A storm is on the horizon. America’s days are numbered. A Chinese submarine has gone rogue and is navigating towards the continental United States, putting its nuclear missiles within striking distance of the West Coast. A rising Silicon Valley tech mogul with unknown allegiances is at the forefront of a revolution in quantum computing and Artificial Intelligence. A politician controlled by a foreign power is a breath away from the Oval Office. Three seemingly disconnected events are on a collision course to ignite a power grab unlike anything the world has ever seen.

Robert Harland ended his career as a British spy in an Austrian hospital, after being tortured and beaten by Czech security agents in the last days of the communist regime. He was young enough then to find a new life with the Red Cross and then with the UN.

Old spies grow ridiculous, River. Old spies aren't much better than clowns. Or so David Cartwright used to say, but he forgot to add they can be dangerous too, especially if they've fallen on hard times - as Diana Taverner learns when the past lands on her desk. An operation carried out during the height of the Troubles laid bare the ugly side of state security, and those involved are threatening to expose details. But every threat hides an opportunity, and the would-be blackmailer is soon being used as Taverner's solution to a much newer problem.

Every word a president utters is weighed and examined, but none more so than when he is talking about Taiwan. That's why it's shocking that President Jack Ryan seems to imply that the US has no appetite for a war to protect Taiwan from the communist Chinese on the mainland. President Ryan is determined to protect the independence of the island nation, but he is determined that one slip of the tongue should not cost thousands of young soldiers, sailors and Marines their lives.

The never-before-seen history of Westeros and the lands beyond. With hundreds of pages of all-new material from George R.R. Martin.If the past is prologue, then George R.R. Martin's masterwork - the most inventive and entertaining fantasy saga of our time - warrants one hell of an introduction. At long last, it has arrived with The World of Ice and Fire.

For Gabriel Allon and his wife Chiara, it was supposed to be the start of a romantic weekend in London. But nothing is ever that simple when you're an off-duty spy and assassin. A pair of bombings in Paris and Copenhagen has put him on edge and when Gabriel notices a man exhibiting several traits common to suicide bombers, he follows him into the Covent Garden throng. He's determined to prevent the carnage he fears is about to take place, but before Gabriel can draw his sidearm, he is knocked to the pavement by two plain-clothes police officers.

A new president offers hope to a country weary of conflict. He’s a young, popular, self-made visionary...but he’s also a man with a secret. Halfway across the globe a regional superpower struggles with sanctions imposed by the Great Satan and her European allies, a country whose ancient religion spawned a group of ruthless assassins. Faced with internal dissent and extrajudicial targeted killings by the United States and Israel, the Supreme Leader puts a plan in motion to defeat the most powerful nation on Earth.

Bringing together a cast of fascinating characters in a riveting tale of ambition and corruption, politics, passion, and ultimate justice, Dangerous Games is a thrilling drama from number-one New York Times best-selling author Danielle Steel.

Here in Slough House, the intelligence service's home for inept spies, it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. Roddy Ho is used to being the one the slow horses turn to when they need miracles performed, and he's always been Jackson Lamb's Number Two. So when Lamb has a photograph that needs doctoring, it's Ho he entrusts with the task. Christmas is a time for memories, but Lamb doesn't do memories—or so he says. But what is it about the photo that makes him want to alter it? How would the slow horses cope if Roddy Ho didn't exist?

Jeremy Summers, a British banker with a secret that could reveal MI6 intelligence sources involved in the war against drug-funded terrorism, has been seized at gunpoint, in broad daylight, on the streets of west London. An old contact, Raglan - an Englishman who served in the French Foreign Legion - is on his trail. Raglan's pursuit will lead him to the winter-ravaged wasteland of a remote Russian penal colony. A place that holds Russia's most brutal murderers. A place of death and retribution. How will he get in? More importantly, how will he get out...alive?

Evan Smoak doesn’t have many friends. Goes with the territory for a former off-the-books government assassin. He certainly can’t afford to fall out with the best of them. But Tommy Stojack, a gifted quartermaster whom Evan trusts and relies on, has crossed a line. And when Evan tries to confront him, instead of robust conversation, he comes under attack. Now it’s war. Tommy’s got other things on his mind, though. He promised a dying comrade that he’d be there for the man’s son, and now the boy’s got himself into a world of trouble.

M laid down his pipe and stared at it tetchily. 'We have no choice. We're just going to bring forward this other chap you've been preparing. But you didn't tell me his name.' 'It's Bond, sir,' the Chief of Staff replied. 'James Bond.' One body. Three bullets. 007 floats in the waters of Marseille, killed by an unknown hand. It's time for a new agent to step up. Time for a new weapon in the war against organised crime. It's time for James Bond to earn his licence to kill.