Soviet Thriller

A chilling, relentlessly suspenseful story of international intrigue and high-voltage political tension set in contemporary Russia, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The General's Daughter. "Highly engaging super-suspense." —Kirkus Reviews On a dark road deep inside Russia, a...

A torpedo is in the water, and the fifty men about to die do not officially exist. Ten days earlier, a North Korean Romeo-class submarine slips out of Wonsan on a night tide. She is thirty years obsolete, running on a battery that no longer holds a full charge, and she carries sealed orders and a passenger: a defector with thirty years of secrets and a bottle of vodka rationed by the day, like the amps. Captain Ryu is ordered north. He turns south instead, through the Tsushima Strait, because it is the last route anyone will expect. It works, and it ruins him. Within four days Pyongyang has...

Klim Rogov, a celebrated radio anchorman, never imagined he’d be treated like royalty in the Soviet Union when he arrived in 1927. But his assignment as a United Press correspondent in Moscow gives him access to the country’s most dangerous and powerful circles. Klim isn’t here for the champagne and privilege that ordinary Russians can only dream of. He’s here for Nina, his wife, who was kidnapped by Bolshevik agents. Every day in Moscow is a tightrope walk: one wrong word, one wrong look, and he could be branded a spy, condemned in a show trial, and lose Nina forever.

A World War II Military Thriller Inspired by True Events of the Winter War In the frozen skies of 1939 Finland, death doesn’t come from above—it hunts in formation. As the Soviet invasion begins, Finnish fighter ace Lieutenant Veikko Niemi takes to the air in his outclassed Fokker D.XXI, battling overwhelming numbers in defense of his homeland. But something is different this time. The Soviet pilots aren't flying blind bombing runs—they’re coordinated, precise, and deadly. Led by the enigmatic Major Grigori Chernyavin, a disgraced stunt pilot returned from Stalin’s purges, the ...

SHE CAME TO STEAL THE MOON. Cape Kennedy, January 1969. A fuel truck explodes on the loading dock, and in the corridor above it a housekeeper stops her cart and counts - distance, direction, number of men, rate of spread - before the alarm has finished its first note. Her name is Teresa Maria Torres. Her badge says she is a Cuban refugee, GS-2, third floor, three months on the job. Her file was written by people who believed a woman who cleans a building has nothing worth asking about. Moscow sent her here to be furniture. It worked. She has a master key the government issued her itself, a ...

An edge-of-your-seat thriller about China's secret role in the space race—written by the New York Times bestselling author of The Apollo Murders and one of the most experienced astronauts alive. Houston, 1975. A new Apollo mission launches into orbit, on course to dock with a Russian Soyuz...

From New York Times bestselling author and astronaut Chris Hadfield comes this exceptional thriller into the dark heart of the Cold War and the space race—soon to be a major TV series from Altitude and Sylvester Stallone’s Balboa Productions. "An exciting journey" —Andy Weir, author of The...

Can Saddam’s Army hold its own… …against the weight of American military might? Tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, paratroopers, and amphibious assault vehicles mobilize to bring the pain for Operation Desert Storm. Will Saddam use chemical and biological weapons to try and even the score? The mighty guns of the USS Iowa and Wisconsin support one final amphibious assault. Will their 36-inch, 2,000-pound shells shatter the Iraqi defenses and open the way for the Marines? The largest tank battle since World War II is brewing. What if America didn’t stop in southern Iraq? ...

When a defector reveals that the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal is broken, a Houston police officer becomes the only person who can extract her and change the course of the Cold War. Phil Swain is a SWAT sergeant haunted by a shooting that killed an officer under his command. When a CIA recruiter offers him a way out training as an Army linguist for a weapons verification operation, Phil accepts, not knowing it will pull him into something far larger than his past trauma. In East Germany, posing as a translator, Phil discovers a KGB major willing to defect with classified evidence: the ...

ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025 The definitive history of Russia’s most secret spy program, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a revelatory examination of how that hidden history shaped both Russia and the West. More than a century...

The Arkady Renko book that started it all: the #1 bestseller Gorky Park, an espionage classic that begins the series, by Martin Cruz Smith, “the master of the international thriller” (The New York Times). It begins with a triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen...

A propulsive, relentless page-turner filled with conspiracies, hope, and resilience, from a bestselling author. "Inventive, edgy and relentlessly gripping from the first page to the last." —Scott Turow, #1 bestselling author of Presumed Innocent Stalin's Soviet Union strives to be a paradise...

In the second installment in the Arkady Renko series from internationally bestselling author Martin Cruz Smith, Renko goes up against the Soviet bureaucracy in a complex international web and discovering more than he bargained for. Arkady Renko, former Chief Investigator of the Moscow Town...

Detective Arkady Renko—“one of the most compelling figures in modern fiction” (USA TODAY)—returns in this tense thriller set amid the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the latest installment of Martin Cruz Smith’s celebrated Arkady Renko series, the legendary Moscow...

From a New York Times bestselling author, astronaut, and fighter pilot comes a Cold War thriller perfect for fans of Top Gun and The Hunt for Red October. "A full-throttle, adrenaline-laced espionage page-turner" —Jack Carr, New York Times bestselling author of The Terminal List series Israel...

A Cambridge aristocrat. A disgruntled CIA officer. An FBI agent who knelt in church. Three men who sold the West to Moscow – and nearly won. Kim Philby, Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen – three double agents who betrayed their countries for ideology, money, and ego. This is the definitive account of the intelligence failures that let them operate for decades. The official histories celebrate the spies who saved the West. They bury the ones who tried to destroy it. The textbooks mention the Cambridge Five and the CIA moles in a single paragraph. But they never answer the question that haunts...

From Martin Cruz Smith, the internationally bestselling author of Gorky Park, comes a mystery that reaches international proportions in this entertaining fourth title in the Arkady Renko series. Former Inspector for the Moscow Militsiya, Arkady Renko, is summoned to Cuba to identify a liquefying...

FromNew York Timesbestselling authors Steve Berry and Grant Blackwood comes an action-packed adventure: in the waning days of the Cold War, Luke Daniels embarks on a quest in search of the legendary library of Ivan the Terrible—the unlikely key to ending a looming threat orbiting two hundred...

Two fleets, one datum, and nobody willing to be the one who blinks. On Halloween morning a Soviet destroyer shoulders an American destroyer hull to hull, steel screaming, firehoses across the rails. Above them fighters and bombers trade radar locks like currency, each snap of a fire-control set a sentence in a language both navies read fluently. Below them, in the middle of all of it, a North Korean diesel boat runs at two knots and thirty-eight meters, conned by ear beneath the mutual roar of two carrier groups. It is the quietest hour of the loudest day of the Cold War. Then the hunter ...

Back from exile, Renko must defeat the powerful black-market crime lords in this third installment to the Arkady Renko series by internationally bestselling author Martin Cruz Smith. Back from exile in the hellish reaches of the Soviet Union, homicide investigator Arkady Renko discovers that his...