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Espionage

Book Review: The Last Agent by Robert Dugoni

By John Valeri

September 22, 2020

American operative Charles Jenkins once again finds himself in Russia on the run for his life in a thriller of heart-stopping betrayal and international intrigue. Robert Dugoni—New York Times bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite and David Sloane series—thought he was writing a standalone with last year’s The Eighth Sister. That book introduced Charles Jenkins,…

Criminal Element Book Club, Week 8: Olen Steinhauer Answers Your Milo Weaver Questions

By Olen Steinhauer

February 25, 2020

You have so many details woven into the story like the CIA office in the World Trade Center and the precursor to the CIA, the Pond. Did you find these true facts before you wrote “The Tourist” or did you add them later? Was there an advisor who had intelligence work knowledge you worked with…

The Edgar Awards Revisited: Catch Me: Kill Me by William H. Hallahan (Best Novel; 1978)

By Doreen Sheridan

June 21, 2019

Right from the very title, William H. Hallahan has written a book of juxtapositions, a novel that relentlessly compares and contrasts its two main protagonists and the situations and societies in which they find themselves. Ostensibly a spy thriller, Catch Me: Kill Me follows two men who never meet, and whose interests in the case…

Hopscotch by Brian Garfield

The Edgar Awards Revisited: Hopscotch by Brian Garfield (Best Novel; 1976)

By Scott Adlerberg

June 7, 2019

Brian Garfield had written over 50 books by the time Hopscotch, the 1976 Edgar winner for Best Novel, was published. Born in New York City in 1939, Garfield started writing young, and his first book came out when he was eighteen. Throughout the 1960s, he wrote mainly westerns, churning out three or four novels per…

World War II and Ungentlemanly Warfare

By Alisa Smith

April 16, 2019

There is no honor among thieves, they say. Perhaps it should not be surprising that when thieves are recruited into a nation’s secret service, there may be a shortage of honor among spies, also. This is what happened during World War II when the Allied powers were desperate for any means to defeat the Nazis,…

Of All the Gin Joints

By Charles Cumming

February 19, 2019

In a culture of prequels and sequels, origin stories and franchise reboots, it seems no box-office hit can be considered safe from the recycling junkies in Hollywood. Psycho, Minority Report, The Karate Kid, Fargo—all have been variously updated and rebranded for the 21st century, with wildly different results. For every Dawn of the Dead there…

Why 1920s Paris Is the Best Setting for a Spy Thriller

By Tessa Lunney

December 23, 2018

Why set a thriller in 1920s Paris? This is the Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of Gertrude Stein and Nancy Cunard, of Josephine Baker in her banana skirt taking her pet leopard for a walk. This is a Paris of wild parties full of flappers and swells—surely this is not a place for spies, surely…

Watch the Official “Car Chase” Clip from the Upcoming Action-Comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me

By Crime HQ

July 9, 2018

A team of Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon doesn’t usually conjure up images of international spies on the run from deadly assassins. But on August 3rd, the two leading ladies will dive deep into the world of espionage in The Spy Who Dumped Me. Audrey (Kunis) and Morgan (McKinnon), two thirty-year-old best friends in Los…

The Good Assassin: New Excerpt

By Paul Vidich

May 4, 2017

The Good Assassin by Paul Vidich is a suspenseful tale of Cold War espionage set in 1950s Cuba, where foreign powers compete to influence the outcome of a revolution. Former CIA Agent George Mueller arrives in Havana in August 1958—the last months before the fall of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista—to look into the activities of…

How Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism Has Changed

By Arthur Kerns

June 21, 2016

One night, after working on a murder mystery that was going nowhere, I toyed with the idea of starting an espionage thriller series. Along with tossing around possible locations and when the action would take place, I had to come up with realistic characters. Who would be the protagonist? Naturally, all the interesting people I…

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