Best Spy and Espionage Thrillers for Writers

Eye of the Needle

By Ken Follett

An enemy spy code named "The Needle" knows the vital secret of the Allies deception and holds the key to Nazi victory.

A group of Allied agents is sent into the heart of the Austrian Alps in 1944 to rescue a military staff member from an inaccessible Nazi stronghold before he is forced to expose plans for D-Day. Reprint.

The Odessa File

By Frederick Forsyth

A group of SS survivors is planning to carry out Hitler's "final solution" 20 years after his death.

The Day of the Jackal

By Frederick Forsyth

The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man. One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.

The Eagle Has Landed

By Jack Higgins

As the Allied forces slowly begin turning the tide of war, Hitler vehemently orders the impossible—kidnap Winston Churchill, or kill him. A crack team of commandos led by a disgraced war hero must venture into the heart of England to carry out their mission, or die trying. Meanwhile, in a quiet seaside village, a beautiful widow and an IRA assassin have already laid the groundwork for what will be the most treacherous plot of the war. It begins on November 6, 1943, when Berlin receivs the fateful message... "First rate...a fascinating adventure story." —San Francisco Chronicle "The master's master of World War II spycraft storytelling...A superb and mysterious tale." —United Press International

The Hunt for Red October

By Tom Clancy

Both the Americans and the Soviets commence an intense naval search when a trusted and skilled Soviet naval officer defects--using the USSR's most valuable nuclear submarine as his escape vehicle

A Coffin for Dimitrios

By Eric Ambler

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The classic story of an ordinary man seemingly out of his depth, this is Ambler's most widely acclaimed novel, "one of the masterpieces of the genre" (The New York Times Book Review). A chance encounter with a Turkish colonel leads Charles Latimer, the author of a handful of successful mysteries, into a world of sinister political and criminal maneuvers. At first merely curious to reconstruct the career of the notorious Dimitrios, whose body has been identified in an Istanbul morgue, Latimer soon finds himself caught up in a shadowy web of assassination, espionage, drugs, and treachery that spans the Balkans.