Reading for Leisure: Thrillers/Spies

From New York Times-bestselling author Philip Kerr, the much-anticipated return of Bernie Gunther, our compromised former Berlin bull and unwilling SS officer. With his cover blown, he is waiting for the next move in the cat-and-mouse game that, even a decade after Germany's defeat, continues to shadow his life.   The French Riviera, 1956: The invitation to dinner was not unexpected, though neither was it welcome. Erich Mielke, deputy head of the East German Stasi, has turned up in Nice, and he's not on holiday. An old and dangerous adversary, Mielke is calling in a debt. He intends that Bernie go to London and, with the vial of Thallium he now pushes across the table, poison a female agent they both have had dealings with. But chance intervenes in the form of Friedrich Korsch, an old Kripo comrade now working for Stasi and probably there to make sure Bernie gets the job done. Bernie bolts for the German border. Traveling by night, holed up during the day, Bernie has plenty of down time to recall the last time Korsch and he worked together. It was the summer of 1939: At Hitler's mountaintop retreat in Obersalzberg, the body of a low-level bureaucrat has been found murdered. Bernie and Korsch are selected to run the case. They have one week to solve the murder--Hitler is due back then to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Lucky Bernie: it's his reward for being Kripo's best homicide detective. He knows what a box he's in: millions have been spent to secure Obersalzberg. It would be a disaster if Hitler were to discover a shocking murder had been committed on the terrace of his own home. But the mountaintop is home to an elite Nazi community. It would be an even bigger disaster for Bernie if one of them was the murderer.

In England, Kurt Miller is released from prison after serving a thirteen-month sentence for trafficking in narcotics. Prior to his arrest, Miller had been an intelligence agent and analyst for the BND, Germany's federal intelligence agency. Upon his release, Miller returns to Hamburg and finds that all he has treasured is gone. His wife, his career, and his pension. All he has left is his vintage Mercedes, which he has to sell in order to fund his hunt for the people who framed him for a crime he didn't commit. Using his old contacts at BND and his brother's contacts in the criminal network, Miller eventually tracks down the man who turned him into Scotland Yard for drug trafficking. Miller is told that he was set up by a former CIA agent named Carl Tanner. And this is where it falls into place. That is, Miller learns that he was framed for the crime in order to discredit an intelligence report he authored. That is, in order to discredit him. Miller's quest for vengeance takes him into the seedy corridors of Washington power and political games where human life has little value.

A starting new thriller with one of the most original concepts in years, where the line between a life of luxury and an existence of poverty can be determined by the stroke of midnight.In San Celeste, a series of uniquely brutal murders targets victims from totally different walks of life. In a society divided according to Zodiac signs, those differences are cast at birth and binding for life. All eyes are on detective Jerome Burton and astrological profiler Lindi Childs--divided in their beliefs over whether the answer is written in the stars, but united in their conviction that there is an ingenious serial killer executing a grand plan.Together, they will unravel a dark tale of betrayal, lost love, broken promises and a devastating truth with the power to tear their world apart . .

Critics are calling I AM PILGRIM: "Unputdownable." —Booklist "The best book of 2014." —Suspense Magazine "The next Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." —The New York Post A breakneck race against time…and an implacable enemy. An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel, all identifying characteristics dissolved by acid. A father publicly beheaded in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square. A notorious Syrian biotech expert found eyeless in a Damascus junkyard. Smoldering human remains on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan. A flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity. One path links them all, and only one man can make the journey. Pilgrim.

Mark Greaney, the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, delivers another breakneck thriller following the world's deadliest assassin--the Gray Man...   After five years on the run Court Gentry is back on the inside at the CIA. But his first mission makes him wish he had stayed on the outs when a pair of Chinese agents try to take him down in Hong Kong. Normally the Chinese prefer to stay eyes-only on foreign agents. So why are they on such high alert?   Court's high stakes hunt for answers takes him across Southeast Asia and leads to his old friend, Donald Fitzroy, who is being held hostage by the Chinese. Fitzroy was contracted to find Fan Jiang, a former member of an ultra-secret computer warfare unit responsible for testing China's own security systems. And it seems Fan may have been too good at his job--because China wants him dead.   The first two kill teams Fitzroy sent to find Fan have disappeared and the Chinese have decided to "supervise" the next operation. What they don't know is that Gentry's mission is to find Fan first and get whatever intel he has to the US.   After that, all he has to do is get out alive...

An invaluable CIA asset has gone missing, and with him, secrets that in the wrong hands could prove disastrous. The only question is: Can Mitch Rapp find him first? Joe Rickman, head of CIA clandestine operations in Afghanistan, has been kidnapped and his four bodyguards executed in cold blood. But Mitch Rapp’s experience and nose for the truth make him wonder if something even more sinister isn’t afoot. Irene Kennedy, director of the CIA, has dispatched him to Afghanistan to find Rickman at all costs. Rapp, however, isn’t the only one looking for Rickman. The FBI is too, and it quickly becomes apparent that they’re less concerned with finding Rickman than placing the blame on Rapp. With CIA operations in crisis, Rapp must be as ruthless and deceitful as his enemies if he has any hope of finding Rickman and completing his mission. But with elements within his own government working against both him and American interests, will Rapp be stopped dead before he can succeed?

The thrilling new novel in the #1 New York Times- bestselling series. There's an uneasy and unholy alliance building across the Caribbean. Few in the U.S. government want to believe that a Third World country and its chest-thumping leader could pose a credible threat-but then why are the Chinese helping to train its special forces? Why are the Russians helping to build a nuclear power plant? Charley Castillo and his men go in to investigate, but they have no idea what they have just gotten themselves into. By the time they finish connecting the dots, they will be on the hit lists of the Kremlin, the Cubans, the Venezuelans, and the drug cartels-and totally out on their own. Whatever happens next, they'll have to do it by themselves.

Convicted murderer Melvin Mars is counting down the last hours before his execution--for the violent killing of his parents twenty years earlier--when he's granted an unexpected reprieve. Another man has confessed to the crime. Amos Decker, newly hired on an FBI special task force, takes an interest in Mars's case after discovering the striking similarities to his own life: Both men were talented football players with promising careers cut short by tragedy. Both men's families were brutally murdered. And in both cases, another suspect came forward, years after the killing, to confess to the crime. A suspect who may or may not have been telling the truth. The confession has the potential to make Melvin Mars--guilty or not--a free man. Who wants Mars out of prison? And why now? But when a member of Decker's team disappears, it becomes clear that something much larger--and more sinister--than just one convicted criminal's life hangs in the balance. Decker will need all of his extraordinary brainpower to stop an innocent man from being executed.

In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered. Inside are thirty-six bodies--all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago. While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city. The nightmare has begun. Again.

“As moving as it is gripping. A winner on all fronts.”—Booklist (starred review) “Heart-pounding…This is Gross’s best work yet, with his heart and soul imprinted on every page.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Poland. 1944. Alfred Mendl and his family are brought on a crowded train to a Nazi concentration camp after being caught trying to flee Paris with forged papers. His family is torn away from him on arrival, his life’s work burned before his eyes. To the guards, he is just another prisoner, but in fact Mendl—a renowned physicist—holds knowledge that only two people in the world possess. And the other is already at work for the Nazi war machine. Four thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, Intelligence lieutenant Nathan Blum routinely decodes messages from occupied Poland. Having escaped the Krakow ghetto as a teenager after the Nazis executed his family, Nathan longs to do more for his new country in the war. But never did he expect the proposal he receives from “Wild” Bill Donovan, head of the OSS: to sneak into the most guarded place on earth, a living hell, on a mission to find and escape with one man, the one man the Alliesbelieve can ensure them victory in the war. Bursting with compelling characters and tense story lines, this historical thriller fromNew York Times bestseller Andrew Gross is a deeply affecting, unputdownable series of twists and turns through a landscape at times horrifyingly familiar but still completely new and compelling.