Every now and again, a new star emerges in the thriller writers’ firmament to dazzle readers with its luminosity. David McCloskey, a former CIA officer and analyst, instantly captured legions of fans with his 2022 stand-out debut Damascus Station.
McCloskey, who served in Syria, combined a wealth of authentic-seeming inside detail with enthralling storytelling. Sam Joseph, a CIA officer, is dispatched to Damascus to recruit Mariam Haddad, a Syrian official. It’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that their relationship soon slips from the professional to the personal. Both must navigate the terrifying world of Syria under the murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad. Damascus is vividly drawn with evocative scene-setting, from its back streets to deadly intrigue inside the presidential palace.
In Moscow X McCloskey moves the story to Russia as the CIA plans to disrupt President Putin’s global financial networks. Here McCloskey also steps deeper inside the inner workings of the CIA while showcasing a new protagonist: Artemis Proctor, a layered and very engaging creation.
Proctor once again takes centre stage in McCloskey’s third novel The Seventh Floor. Russia has a mole in the top echelons of the CIA, somewhere on the seventh floor of the headquarters. Proctor is brutally dismissed from the service, but soon finds an ally with the welcome return of Sam Joseph. The duo set up their own ad-hoc spy agency to hunt down the traitor, while McCloskey feeds in more of her backstory.
Like all the best spy fiction, McCloskey’s books weave deeper questions about love, friendship, loyalty and betrayal into the narrative. Readers wishing to take a deeper dive into the world of spies and shadows can listen to the always excellent and informative The Rest is Classified podcast, which McCloskey co-hosts with Gordon Corera, a former BBC Security Correspondent.
‘Like all the best spy fiction, McCloskey’s books weave deeper questions about love, friendship, loyalty and betrayal into the narrative’
Back in the early 1990s I reported on the Yugoslav wars for several British newspapers. Had Yugoslavia, then the most economically advanced country in the region, taken a different path, it could have been the first to join the EU and NATO. Instead, its leaders chose war. In Red Water, the award-winning thriller by Jurica Pavičić, Silva, a teenage girl, disappears from her home on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast in 1989 as Yugoslavia collapses into conflict. Pavičić skilfully recounts her family’s search for Silva against a backdrop of killing and destruction in this notably moving and engrossing read that reaches over many years.
Paul Vidich, a former music industry executive, has emerged over the last few years to take a leading place in the first division of thriller writers. His previous works have been set in Beirut during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Berlin in 1989, and Cuba in 1958. What they all have in common is an understated elegance combined with gripping storytelling. His latest, The Poet’s Game, unfolds in Moscow in the present day. Alex Matthews, a former CIA station chief, has left espionage for a job in finance. But he returns to the Russian capital in a high-risk mission that could cost him everything in his new life. Matthews’ spy skills may be dormant, but they are not blunted as he moves through a dangerous but alluring Moscow, once again relishing the perilous, high-stakes game of spying in hostile territory.
Frederick Forsyth, who passed away in June 2025, was one of the world’s best-known thriller writers. The Odessa File, first published in 1972, is still in print. The plot revolves around a sinister Nazi organization known as Odessa, running rat-lines down which SS officers escaped to South America. Before his death, Forsyth wrote a lengthy outline for a sequel, now co-written with British thriller writer Tony Kent. Unfolding in the present day and roaming from Germany to the White House, Revenge of Odessa is a cracking read—and a treat both for anyone who enjoyed the original or is new to Forsyth’s works.
Merle Nygate’s trilogy featuring Eli Amiram, Mossad’s London station chief, is less well known but deserves much greater attention. The Protocols of Spying is the third volume, unfolding after the 7 October terror attack. Nygate vividly portrays the stunned horror of the Israelis as the reality of the slaughter unfolds. Meanwhile, Mossad, like the CIA, MI6 and other intelligence services, is filled with scheming factions and cabals. Nygate draws Amiram as a complex, sympathetic figure in this engrossing, authentic-feeling series.
‘Unfolding in the present day and roaming from Germany to the White House, Revenge of Odessa is a cracking read’
Back in the near neighbourhood, Catherine Merridale’s remarkable debut novel Moscow Underground unfolds in the city in 1934. The Russian capital is brilliantly portrayed as Merridale, an acclaimed historian of Russia, takes the reader back in time to an era of terror. As Moscow awaits Stalin’s purge, Anton Belkin, a criminal investigator, is probing the mysterious death of an archaeologist during the construction of the new city Metro. But the excavations are churning up much more than mud and dirt—and this is no time to be asking inconvenient questions.
And finally, a mention for my own Danube Blues crime thriller trilogy, featuring Balthazar Kovacs, a Roma detective in the Budapest murder squad. District VIII, the first volume, opens at Keleti station during the 2015 refugee crisis. When the body of a Syrian refugee is found nearby, Kovacs is quickly drawn into a dangerous international conspiracy that reaches through the corridors of power to the Middle East—and one in which his brother Gaspar is deeply enmeshed. In Kossuth Square, the sequel, Kovacs must investigate the death of a VIP in Budapest’s most upmarket brothel—and untangle the continuing threads of intrigue and menace that reach back to the migrant crisis. Dohany Street opens with the disappearance of Elad Harrari, a young Israeli historian. Harrari was investigating the fate of the assets of the Hungarian Jews murdered in the Holocaust—and it’s clear his probing questions have set off alarm bells among some very powerful people. Once again, Kovacs is drawn into a perilous web of intrigue and betrayal—one that this time reaches back to 1944 and the Holocaust.
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