Russian stuff in fiction
Explore a curated list of fiction books featuring Russian themes, characters, and settings. Dive into captivating stories filled with Russian culture, history, and intrigue.
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Gorky Park
by Martin Cruz Smith
"Brilliant...One of the best books of the season." ASSOCIATED PRESS A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible--and tries to stay alive doing it.
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Polar Star
by Martin Cruz Smith
Arkady Renko has made too many enemies and now he toils in obscurity on a Russian factory ship in the middle of the Bering Sea. But when a female crew member is picked up dead with the day's catch, Arkady becomes obsessed with the case and once again discovers more than he wants to know and certainly more than he bargained for....
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Red Square
by Martin Cruz Smith
"Sharply, evocatively written and elaborately plotted...It should find as many friends as did GORKY PARK." THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD Back from exile, Arkady Reko returns to find that his country, his Moscow, even his job, are nearly dead. Not so his enemies. Hounded by the Russian mafia, chased by ruthless minions of the newly rich and powerful, and tempted by his great love, Arkady can only hope for escape. Fate, however, has other ideas.... A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A LITERARY GUILD MAIN SELECTION
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A Matter of Honor
by Jeffrey Archer
Featuring a bonus interview with the authorAdisgraced British colonel bequeaths a mysterious letter to his only son. The moment Adam Scott opens the yellowing envelope, he sets into motion a deadly chain of events.Within days, he's running for his life, pursued by the KGB, the CIA, and his own countrymen. Powerful men plot his destruction and Adam is betrayed and abandoned even by those he holds most dear. When he finally realizes what he possesses, he's even more determined to protect it, for it's more than a matter of life and death-- it's a matter of honor.
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Triple
by Ken Follett
A New York Times bestselling novel of international suspense and terror from the author of Edge of Eternity and Eye of the Needle. As Egypt comes closer and closer to developing a nuclear bomb, the Mossad's number one Israeli agent is given an impossible mission: to beat the Arabs in the nuclear arms race by finding and stealing two hundred tons of uranium. The world's balance of power will shift. And the Mossad, the KGB, the Egyptians, and Fedayeen terrorists will play out the final, violent moves in this devastating game where the price of failure is a nuclear holocaust. . . .
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The Man from St. Petersburg
by Ken Follett
A Russian emissary sent to England to negotiate a Soviet-British alliance is stalked by a deadly anarchist.
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The Cardinal of the Kremlin
by Tom Clancy
As the Star Wars race between the Soviet Union and United States continues to escalate, Colonel Mikkail Filtov, America's agent in the Kremlin, is about to be betrayed, and only Jack Ryan can save Filtov--and world peace. Reissue.
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Red Storm Rising
by Tom Clancy
From the author of the Jack Ryan series comes an electrifying #1 New York Times bestseller—a standalone military thriller that envisions World War 3... A chillingly authentic vision of modern war, Red Storm Rising is as powerful as it is ambitious. Using the latest advancements in military technology, the world's superpowers battle on land, sea, and air for ultimate global control. It is a story you will never forget. Hard-hitting. Suspenseful. And frighteningly real. “Harrowing...tense...a chilling ring of truth.”—TIME
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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
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Icon
by Frederick Forsyth
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the master of the novel of international intrigue comes a riveting new book as timely and unsettling as tomorrow's headlines. It is summer 1999 in Russia, a country on the threshold of anarchy. An interim president sits powerless in Moscow as his nation is wracked by famine and inflation, crime and corruption, and seething hordes of the unemployed roam the streets. For the West, Russia is a basket case. But for Igor Komarov, one-time army sergeant who has risen to leadership of the right-wing UPF party, the chaos is made to order. As he waits in the wings for the presidential election of January 2000, his striking voice rings out over the airwaves offering the roiling masses hope at last—not only for law, order, and prosperity, but for restoring the lost greatness of their land. Who is this man with the golden tongue who is so quickly becoming the promise of a Russia reborn? A document stolen from party headquarters and smuggled to Washington and London sends nightmare chills through those who remember the past, for this Black Manifesto is pure Mein Kampf in a country with frightening parallels to the Germany of the Weimar Republic. Officially the West can do nothing, but in secret a group of elder statesmen sends the only person who can expose the truth about Komarov into the heart of the inferno. Jason Monk, ex-CIA and "the best damn agent-runner we ever had," had sworn he would never return to Moscow, but one name changes his mind. Colonel Anatoli Grishin, the KGB officer who tortured and murdered four of Monk's agents after they had been betrayed by Aldrich Ames, is now Komarov's head of security. Monk has a dual mission: to stop Komarov, whatever it takes, and to prepare the way for an icon worthy of the Russian people. But he has a personal mission as well: to settle the final score with Grishin. To do this he must stay alive--and the forces allied against him are ruthless, the time frighteningly short. . . . Praise for Icon “Vintage Forsyth, intricate, exact and gripping.”—The New York Times Book Review “Another strong performance by a writer who knows exactly what he's about, and who here catalyzes narrative with another memorable protagonist, the stealthy and daring Monk.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “One of his best works for a long time, which provides an all-too-real look at a chilling new millennium.”—The Sunday Times, London
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Dead Meat
by Philip Kerr
EVERYONE IS GUILTY OF SOMETHING... In comtemporary Russia the old ghosts have been laid to rest, but the stench of corruption is just as strong as ever. Now a top-level Moscow investigator, dispatched to St. Petersburg, is about to discover just how deep the decadence runs--in both the corridors of power and the labyrinth of the human heart. The man from Moscow has been teamed up with Grushko, a palm-reading local detective with Elvis Presley hair. Together they embark on a investigation into the brutal murder of a famous and controversial journalist. To Grushko, an expert in the ruthlessness of the rising Russian Mafia, the killing has all the earmarks of a professional hit. But in the new Russia appearances have almost as little value as the new ruble. Soon the focus of the investigation will fall on the journalist's widow, a pinup beauty whom one detective will find impossible to trust...the other to resist. Author Bio:
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War of the Rats
by David L. Robbins
For six months in 1942, Stalingrad is the center of a titanic struggle between the Russian and German armies—the bloodiest campaign in mankind's long history of warfare. The outcome is pivotal. If Hitler's forces are not stopped, Russia will fall. And with it, the world.... German soldiers call the battle Rattenkrieg, War of the Rats. The combat is horrific, as soldiers die in the smoking cellars and trenches of a ruined city. Through this twisted carnage stalk two men—one Russian, one German—each the top sniper in his respective army. These two marksmen are equally matched in both skill and tenacity. Each man has his own mission: to find his counterpart—and kill him. But an American woman trapped in Russia complicates this extraordinary duel. Joining the Russian sniper's cadre, she soon becomes one of his most talented assassins—and perhaps his greatest weakness. Based on a true story, this is the harrowing tale of two adversaries enmeshed in their own private war—and whose fortunes will help decide the fate of the world.
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Archangel
by Robert Harris
Fluke Kelso was once a scholar of promise, but like so many in the highly competitive world of academia, he's never delivered. But one night, at a symposium in Moscow concerning the release of secret Soviet archives, he is approached by Papu Rapava, a former Kremlin bodyguard with a story to tell. No one but the desperate Kelso would believe the tale, for what Rapava describes is a sort of Holy Grail among researchers: an actual diary left by Joseph Stalin himself. Such an artifact, if it's genuine -- and if Kelso can survive the fascist Vladimir Mamantov, who wants it for his own agenda -- would be the coup of a lifetime for the discredited researcher. Before Kelso can learn the location of the diary, Rapava disappears, and Kelso's search for the former bodyguard leads him to the man's daughter, a whore selling herself in the new Moscow of drugs, corruption, and the Russian mafia. With an unscrupulous American journalist hot on their heels, a major of the new KGB close behind, and the shadowy Mamantov following them all, the two follow a trail that leads from Moscow's seedy underbelly to the industrial city of Archangel, where Russia once built her fleets of submarines, to a remote camp on the edge of the Siberian nothingness, and finally to a shocking conclusion that bites like the wind blowing off the tundra. What Kelso sees as the coup of his career might turn out to be the catalyst for an actual coup in Russia. There is a legacy behind the diary, a legacy of evil and death, and Fluke Kelso is unwittingly about to unleash it on the world.
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The Russia House
by John Le Carré
John le Carre 's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge, and have earned him unprecedented worldwide acclaim. At a small British trade fair in Moscow, a message of global importance is made up of three very fragile human links: a Soviet physicist (code name Bluebird) burdened with a secret knowledge; a beautiful young Russian woman to whom the papers are entrusted; and Barley Blair, a bewildered English publisher pressed into service by British Intelligence to ferret out the source of the document. A magnificent story of love, betrayal, and courage, The Russia House catches history in the act.
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The White Russian
by Tom Bradby
January 1917--With St. Petersburg on the brink of revolution, Sandro Ruzsky, the city's chief police investigator, returns from exile in Siberia only to be assigned a grisly case: the bodies of a young couple found on the ice of the frozen River Neva, just outside the Tsar's Winter Palace. Ruzsky's investigation leads him dangerously close to the royal family and to the woman he loves, and he finds himself confronting both a ruthless killer and the ghosts of his past as he fights desperately to save all that he cares for. With meticulous research and narrative skill" "Tom Bradby" "brilliantly re-creates the gilded salons and squalid tenements of St. Petersburg in the last days of the tsars. Evocative and thrilling, The White Russian" "is a tumultuous story of murder and betrayal in a city at the crossroads of history.
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The Tristan Betrayal
by Robert Ludlum
In the bestselling tradition of "The Scarlatti Inheritance" and "The Rheineman Exchange," comes a compelling thriller in which one man's actions can change the course of history.
