Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
One of the pleasures of writing about a genre is watching gifted authors develop their talent. In recent years I have reviewed and enjoyed the American espionage author Paul Vidich’s eclectic oeuvre. An earlier work, The Coldest Warrior, was inspired by the mysterious death of his uncle Frank Olson, who worked at a top-secret US army biological warfare facility. Last year’s Beirut Station, set in the 2006 Israel-Hizbollah war, featured a Lebanese-American CIA officer, ordered to kill a Hizbollah terrorist. Vidich’s books all showcase a powerful sense of the complexity of espionage, its moral ambiguity and unrelenting demand for an elastic conscience.
In The Poet’s Game (No Exit Press £18.99/Pegasus $27.95) Vidich confirms his place in the pantheon of the new generation of spy novelists. Once again his elegant, finely developed characters add nuance and depth to a fast-paced story.
Alex Matthews, formerly of the CIA’s Moscow station, has left the agency to pursue a successful career in finance. But Matthews is haunted. His wife and daughter died after their yacht capsized in a storm while Matthews was away on agency business. When the CIA director asks Matthews to return to Russia he grudgingly agrees, even though it means risking everything he has built in his new life. And his old life still thrills. When Matthews loses his FSB surveillance in a seductive, menacing Moscow, he relishes being “Unseen but seeing, his senses alert to sounds, smells, movement on the street”. This is the first volume in a very welcome new series.
There’s plenty of spying too in Lily Samson’s Watch Me Watch You (Century £16.99), but of a very different kind. Alice Smart is an intern at Principle Publishing, working for its star editor, Mina Harpenden. Mina is glacial and aloof, married to a handsome, famous MP. Alice is broke and desperate. So when Mina offers her £1,000 to use her flat for a night, she quickly agrees. Somehow she ends up in a tiny box room watching Mina in a blond wig have wild sex with a young man she just met through an app. This smart, erotic psychological thriller twists and turns as Samson skilfully reveals both women’s dark pasts — and weaves them together in a compelling tale of sex, ambition and deceit.
Moving back in time, the second world war still proves itself a rich and generous story arena. In Gunner (Baskerville, £16.99) Alan Parks introduces a notably original protagonist. Badly wounded in France, limping, blind in one eye and addicted to morphine, Joseph Gunner returns to his native Glasgow, hoping for a quiet life and a warm welcome from his girlfriend Chrissy. But Chrissy is long gone and the city is being bombed into charred rubble by the Luftwaffe.
Before the war Gunner was a detective. He has no desire to return to the streets but his old boss talks him into examining a mutilated body — of a German. Gunner’s no stranger to violence but he is soon moving in very dangerous waters indeed, swept up in a high-level conspiracy reaching from Whitehall’s corridors of power to Berlin and Rudolf Hess’s doomed flight to Scotland. This is the first volume in what promises to be an enthralling series.
Eponymous heroes, it seems, are trending among second world war thrillers. Kane (Head of Zeus £20) is the 10th volume in Graham Hurley’s wide-ranging Spoils of War set. Previous works have unfolded in Kyiv, Stalingrad and Berlin. Read together they bring a panoramic sense of the enormity of the war, its infinite human drama — and cost.
Kane unfolds in the US. Once a tough Boston cop, Quincy Kane is now a Secret Service agent, guarding President Roosevelt. Kane, too, is an engaging protagonist, in love with a female reporter who prises state secrets from him in bed, but also fiercely protective of his little sister, Kathryn. Like President Roosevelt, she has contracted polio. Hurley once again delivers a rich and satisfying read that mixes fictional and historical characters — and one peppered with steamy sex scenes.
Across the Atlantic, DCI Frank Merlin unpeels the dark side of wartime London in Mark Ellis’s Death of an Officer (Headline Accent £10.99). Ellis too conjures up an immersive, authentic world in this evocative series. Even as much of the city is being flattened by the Luftwaffe, its black marketeers still hoard their illicit goods and murderers dispatch their victims. When an Indian gynaecologist is battered to death, Merlin is soon swept up in a case that takes him to the secret corners of London’s elite where probing questions — and those asking — are not welcome.
And finally, a brief mention for Mark Ezra’s impressive debut. A Sting In Her Tale (No Exit Press £9.99) creatively mixes biblical themes with echoes of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club detective series, but is very much its own work. Felicity Jardine is a retired MI6 officer planning to drown herself in a river in Sussex. But when she sees a baby floating past in a car seat, she instead takes the child home. The bad guys want the baby back. Soon after, Felicity’s neighbour is murdered. The ghosts of her missions in 1970s Germany have been reanimated and Felicity and her former colleagues are back in the deadly game.
Adam LeBor is the author of ‘The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance 1940-1945’
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X