29 books like Pilgrim Book

I read The Day of the Jackal when I was very young, then I saw the original film, and later I read the book again.

It fascinates me because of the precision with which it is written and because of two ideas that have been essential to my own career as a writer: how a terrorist group, by commissioning the assassination of De Gaulle, could have changed history with a single bullet had the attempt succeeded, and how politics becomes intertwined with violence and terrorism, showing that they are ultimately inseparable and that one cannot exist without the other.

I loved this book because its story is fast-paced, suspenseful, and thrilling.

I enjoyed the thrill of the main male character trying to outrun the spy that could alter the course of history. It is so well written that at times you wish the spy wouldn’t get caught!

The danger is interwoven with passion, and the heroine is a mix of vulnerability and strength.  

This book is the most recent novel I have read by John le Carré, an author I am deeply drawn to because, usually far removed from fast-paced action, he reflects with remarkable depth on the hidden and opaque forces that truly govern our societies.

Our Game feels like a fitting culmination of his career, and I could not put it down. I read it very quickly, thanks to the precision of his writing and his ability to sustain uncertainty throughout.

The title itself could not be more appropriate: “our game” is the game played by shadow powers, by the hidden face of the state, acting beyond democratic control and with profound disregard for the interests of ordinary men and women.

This book is a real sleeper. If you haven’t read it, drop what you’re doing and order it; you won’t be disappointed. This book, more than any other, reminded me of Raymond Chandler in voice, story, and character. I am baffled that this book is not more widely known.

I read this one and immediately ordered the others in this series. This author, under a pen name, wrote an absolute killer book called Five Decembers, which would have been book six on this five-book list. I absolutely loved this one.

This book is the quintessential crime novel that is the closest thing to working the tough streets of Los Angeles. I worked in South Central Los Angeles as a patrol deputy, so I have a basis for this statement. It is a masterpiece of writing capturing the emotions of what it’s like to age out on a job rife with sorrow, constant threat of the unknown, and lots of blood.

I wrote 38 books before I sold my first novel, The Disposables, which gives me the basis to rate the writing craft in this one. For crime readers, this is one not to be missed. Put it at the top of your to-be-read pile.

The reason I recommend this book is because it is so different from most spy thrillers.

The hero,  Kit Carradine, is not a spy. He is a writer living a boring life in London. His father was a spy, however. He gets recruited to do a small job for the Service. When he agrees, his life is changed. Kit is different from the Jack Reachers and Ryans.

He is a professionally naive, and often in over his head, which provides readers a fresh and accessible vantage to the typical genre tropes.

I've never read a book quite like this. It was a little challenging to get into, but by the time I finished, I was blown away by the author's talent.

The character-driven plot makes whiplash-inducing twists and turns from several points of view. The reader is first drawn into the mind of a comatose patient who is slowly regaining consciousness and thinks he sees his roommate being murdered.

Next, we're following Patrick Fort, a teenager with Asperger's Syndrome, who has won a disability scholarship to study anatomy at Cardiff University. Patrick has spent the last ten years fixated on finding out what happened to his father, the victim of a hit-and-run driver.

His habit of bringing home dead animals and examining them alarms his mother but is the foundation for his later expertise in biology, particularly in dissection. At university, he and his team are given a human cadaver and… show more.

I like the Jack Ryan concept, a spy whose dad is the president. I like the campus one-for-all-all-for-one esprit de corps.

The starting point is nothing new – a diabolic plan to start a civil war. The Balkan venue is what makes it interesting. Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Turks, Chechens, Syrians, Russians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Muslim fanatics – what a mix! The reason this particular book is special is because I read it twice.

I have a Serbian colleague, which made the story more relevant to me, personally. We often discuss world events. The first time I read the book I did not know him. The second time I read it was after we had met and discussed extensively. I saw things in a different light and enjoyed it much more the second time.

I read The Sum of All Fears many years ago, but what struck me most was the sense of helplessness ordinary citizens face when confronted with the catastrophes politics can create.

It is not simply about an individual act of evil, but about how the system itself can enable extreme violence that would be impossible without the terrifying power of states and the terrorist groups that grow around them.

That feeling of being at the mercy of politics, unable to do anything about it, is deeply disturbing. It reinforces the idea that no system, not even a well-established democracy, is truly in the hands of those who should own it—the citizens—but rather in the hands of elites with immense power.

This is one of those books I love because you literally cannot put it down until you have reached the final page, and when you do, you are left with a lingering sense of sadness that the book is over.

I love it as a reader, and I admire it as a writer, because it shows how to handle an intense plot with a firm hand, page after page, without losing momentum and without giving the reader a moment to breathe—something I have also tried to achieve in my own books.

In addition, the plausibility of the plot, the dark places where the characters move, the politicians, and those other figures who are always kept hidden from us and who carry out the crimes of power, create an almost disturbingly realistic picture that we should not ignore, because it reveals the true face of power.