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Five Books for Fans of The Gray Man

Everyone loves a good spy thriller! The twists, the villians, the double crossing! The Gray Man movie was such a great watch last weekend so we’ve put together our top five spy thrillers for you! 

A governmental think-tank, whose remit is to curb the independence of the intelligence service, has lost one of its key members. Claude Whelan is tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads straight back to the Park itself, with Diana Taverner as chief suspect. Has Diana overplayed her hand at last? What’s her counterpart, Moscow’s First Desk, doing in London? And does Jackson Lamb know more than he’s telling?

There are bad actors everywhere, and they usually get their comeuppance before the credits roll. But politics is a dirty business, and in a world where lying, cheating and backstabbing are the norm, sometimes the good guys can find themselves outgunned.

It is M’s funeral. One man is missing from the graveside: the traitor who pulled the trigger. He is now in custody, accused of M’s murder – James Bond.

Behind the Iron Curtain, a group of former SMERSH agents want to use the British spy in an operation that will change the balance of world power. Bond is smuggled into the lion’s den. But whose orders is he following, and will he obey them when the moment of truth arrives?

In a mission where treachery is all around and one false move means death, Bond must grapple with the darkest questions about himself. But not even he knows what has happened to the man he used to be.

It is the summer of 1961. The brutal Cold War between East and West is becoming ever more perilous. Two young prodigies from either side of the Iron Curtain, Yulia and Michael, meet at a chess tournament in London. They don’t know it, but they are about to compete in the deadliest game ever played.

Shadowing them is Greta, a ruthless resistance fighter who grew up the hard way in the forests of Lithuania. She is now hunting down some of the most dangerous men in the world.

Men who are also on the radar of Vassily, perhaps the Soviet Union’s greatest spymaster. A man of cunning and influence, Vassily was Yulia’s minder during her visit to the West. Even he could not foresee the consequences of her meeting Michael.

When the world is accelerating towards an inevitable and catastrophic conflict, what can just four people do to prevent it?

Bill Browder’s young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail. Browder made it his life’s mission to go after his killers and make sure they faced justice. The first step of that mission was to uncover who was behind the $230 million tax refund scheme that Magnitsky was killed over. As Browder and his team tracked the money as it flowed out of Russia through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas, they were shocked to discovered that Vladimir Putin himself was a beneficiary of the crime.

As law enforcement agencies began freezing the money, Putin retaliated. He and his cronies set up honey traps, hired process servers to chase Browder through cities, murdered more of his Russian allies, and enlisted some of the top lawyers and politicians in America to bring him down. Putin will stop at nothing to protect his money.

Tokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives. but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder; a Zainichi Korean banker sick of being ostracized for his ethnicity; a struggling single dad of a teenage girl with Down’s syndrome. The fifth man bringing them all together is an elderly drugstore owner grieving his grandson, who has died in suspicious circumstances.

Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, the five conspirators decide to carry out a heist: kidnap the CEO of Japan’s largest beer conglomerate and extract blood money from the company’s corrupt financiers.