Adam LeBor

Best books of 2022: Thrillers

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Thriller books news every morning. by Simon Conway, Hodder & Stoughton £20 The thundering final volume of the trilogy recounting the bloody struggle between MI6 operative Jude Lyon and…

Action-packed spy tales — from Russian defectors to a Nazi Britain

One of the most chilling photographs from the second world war is also one of the most banal. A British policeman holds a car door open as Major Albrecht Lanz, German Kommandant of Guernsey and Jersey, alights outside his headquarters after the Nazi…

Dirty cash, icy chills and 007 in peril — the best new thrillers

All fiction demands the suspension of disbelief, but a book inspired by an absent hero is an especially big ask. In Double or Nothing (HarperCollins, £20), Kim Sherwood is the latest in a series of authors including Jeffrey Deaver, William Boyd and…

Back in the USSR: the best new political thrillers to read now

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Thriller books news every morning. Back in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the cold war faded and it seemed we could be, if not friends, then at least wary partners…

Best summer books of 2022: Thrillers

Damascus Station by David McCloskey, Norton $27.95 This standout debut from a veteran former CIA officer is packed with insider knowledge and the story itself feels completely authentic. The action rolls across Paris and Damascus to make a cracking,…

Best new thrillers — explosive tales of spies, lies and danger

We and the Iranian people are still paying a high price for the 1953 coup that replaced Mohammad Mossadegh, the widely popular prime minister of Iran, with the autocratic rule of the Shah. That coup, organised by the CIA with Britain’s enthusiastic…

Nine Quarters of Jerusalem — a cycle of destruction and reconstruction

I first visited Jerusalem in 1977, aged 16. As I walked down into the plaza in front of the Western Wall, and stared at the cool, ochre stones, pressing a prayer into the cracks between them, I was surprised at the depth of emotion I felt. The Wall,…

Genre round-up — the best new thrillers

Get a shot of inspiration with the FT Weekend bulletin - the best in life, arts and culture. Delivered every Saturday morning. It’s more than 30 years since the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 but the city still casts a powerful spell over spy…

Scandi-noir, Russian London and a rogue Navy Seal — a round-up of new thrillers

Just when I thought it might be safe to venture into the Scandinavian forests again, along comes Hans Rosenfeldt to prove me wrong — and show that the Scandi-noir genre is still thriving. In Cry Wolf (HarperCollins, £14.99) Rosenfeldt, the creator of…

Best books of 2021: Thrillers

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Thriller books news every morning. To the Lake by Yana Vagner, Swift Press £12.99 A deadly virus sweeps across Russia and society collapses, forcing Anya and her family to join a convoy…

Genre round-up — the best in thrillers

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Thriller books news every morning. Back in the early 1990s, when I was a neophyte foreign correspondent, I covered the Yugoslav war. Its complexities were challenging but one simple…

Genre round-up — the best in thrillers

The first piece of advice would-be novelists often receive is “write about what you know”. But with a universe of information just a few clicks away, we can very quickly know all sorts of things. Better counsel, perhaps, would be “write about what…

Genre round-up — the best in thrillers

Historical fiction is a tricky genre to navigate. Authors conjure whole worlds and sometimes rewrite the past. A Nazi victory in the second world war has inspired numerous bestsellers. But command of real-life detail is vital. Woe betide the writer…

Billy Summers by Stephen King — a small-town hitman plans his last job

Billy Summers is a sniper who can take a deadly headshot at 1,200 yards. Summers learned his craft as a US Marine and honed it in the backstreets of Falluja during the Iraq war. His first kill, though, came much earlier — in the trailer where he grew…

Genre round-up — the best new thrillers

There’s an old joke about two foreign correspondents in a bar. One asks: “So what’s new?” His friend replies: “I’m writing a thriller,” to which the first responds: “That’s amazing, neither am I.” The punchline plays on the fact that many journalists…

Summer books of 2021: Thrillers

The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm, Pushkin Press £14.99/Metropolitan Books $24.99 Vibrating with rage at the murder and betrayal of German Jewry, The Passenger recounts the story of Otto Silbermann, a Jewish…

Genre round-up: Scandi-noir and an insider’s insights into spycraft

Scandi-noir demolished the myth of the Swedish social-democratic paradise, where everyone lived in large open-plan apartments overlooking sun-dappled harbours. The truth about Swedish society was far darker and more complex. Geiger (Zaffre £12.99), a…

The Passenger — a rediscovered tale of a man on the run from the Nazis

If German Jewry had any doubts about its fate under the Nazis, they were settled on November 9 1938, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Hundreds of synagogues were destroyed, thousands of businesses ruined and tens of thousands of Jewish men…

The best new thrillers — tales of conflict and espionage

Journalists are not spies, but they share a similar skill set. Emotional intelligence and the ability to read body language are vital. So is a sharp eye for detail and potential sources. In Spy Game (Burning Chair, £8.99), John Fullerton draws on his…

Spy novelist Mick Herron: ‘Like most writers, I am magpie-like’

There is some distance between the Cannery Row of John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel and Slough House, the London headquarters of Mick Herron’s floundering intelligence officers. But that literary journey has brought Herron soaring sales and growing…