11 Books Like A Plague on Both Your Houses

Mark Galeotti takes us into Russia’s criminal underworld, the vory. He explains the early origins, the gulag system where it evolved, and how it stabilizes Russian businesses even today.

He includes tremendous detail and stories from people with insider information. He even talks about the cultural norms of the organization and how they’ve changed in modern times. Who knew?

If you want to learn more about Russian crime syndicates, read the book. You’ll enjoy it.

This is a series of nine spy novels involving the CIA and Russia. The books are complex and well-crafted.

The characters are memorable, although their actions can be predictable. There’s a lot of sex. The bad guys are very bad. The good guys do bad things for good reason.

Saul Herzog made me cringe—in a good way. A manipulative woman undergoes plastic surgery to look like a man’s dead fiancée. A leader in the Russian intelligence organization is a physical and mental creep-fest. Saul conjures up a meal I’d never want to eat.

If you like espionage thrillers, you’ll love the Lance Spector series.

The book's subheading reads A Novel of the CIA. I would go further. This is ‘The Novel of the CIA,’ especially of the CIA between its founding and the early 1990s. It is a masterful combination of real and fictitious spies and covert operations.

The portrayal is so precise, the blending so seamless, that I found myself–and yes, I am supposedly an expert on this–double-checking whether certain operations had taken place. Nonfiction books on the CIA are one of my favorite things, but here, you experience the characters from much closer. I felt their desperation when operations collapsed, or agents were betrayed, or their elation after the rarer successes.

I felt the smoke in James Angleton’s room as he hunted for the missing mole; whether he managed to capture the mole or not will be for you to discover, but the book will stay with you both literally (it’s… show more.

I had to include Alan Furst, the absolute master of historical fiction of the pre-WWII era. The first book of Furst’s Night Soldiers Series, this book introduced me to a new sort of spy thriller: instead of secret agents, these are ordinary people swept up in history.

I do love a makeover, but this is a life-and-death self-reinvention. When Khristo is targeted by the local fascist gang in 1934 Bulgaria, it’s time to run. When his first reinvention becomes dangerous, he reinvents himself again. And again. And finds love on the way. I was inspired at every turn by Khristo’s transformations without ever losing his core decency. The historical detail is so vivid I felt like I was right there with Khristo, whether he was in Moscow, Spain, or Paris. 

Now for some facts, although they will appear stranger than the fiction above. Born with a club foot and unable to join the army during World War II, Sydney Gottlieb became a leading covert warrior. For years, he oversaw some of the CIA’s most controversial programs. He developed poisons to kill foreign leaders and officials, and he worked in MKULTRA, the Agency’s program for mind control, which included the use of LSD, drugs, isolation, and other invasive experiments and forms of torture on witting and unwitting subjects.

The book is a detailed, if harrowing, history. It is even more impressive as most of the documents on these programs were destroyed by Gottlieb himself in 1973, under orders from the CIA Director at the time, Richard Helms. 

Spies, lies, love, coups, what more do you want? In the book we encounter Marie Mitchell, now under threat of assassination, but previously a CIA spy who had fallen in love with–and collaborated in the downfall of–Thomas Sankara.

For Marie, the transition to the CIA is a way of escaping the stifling and misogynistic FBI of the 1980s. For the CIA, a black, attractive woman is ideal to snoop in and undermine a charismatic leader. The book, told by Marie as a letter to her children, moves back and forward between her spying missions and her (self)exile in Martinique.

It is fast-paced, realistic, and able to portray the daring aspects, the bureaucratic obstacles, and the moral compromises of spying for the CIA.

I had been searching contemporary spy authors for a while, wondering if there's anyone still writing today who can match the likes of Graham Greene, Frederick Forsyth, and John le Carre.

I was starting to doubt it, until a fellow writer recommended Silva. This is the first of many books about Gabriel Allon, the renowned art restorer and reluctant assassin for Israeli intelligence. Silva's writing has the direct, no-nonsense feel of Forsyth, and his mixing of fact and fiction is fascinating.

A great pick for anyone looking for an intelligent, literary thriller. 

George Smiley is a most unlikely hero for a spy thriller. He’s old, tired, and just wants to be left with his books and his research. He wears big, comical glasses, and his wife, the lovely Lady Anne, refers to him as her “Toad.” He doesn’t look like a spy at all.

George is old-school—careful, meticulous, and precise. In this book, we are gifted with an insider's view of a gimlet mind as he sifts through the traces of all that’s been buried, in pursuit, not only of the truth but of the foul trick that has turned the British Secret Service inside out. I came to deeply respect George’s integrity, his ability to self-evaluate, and see clearly not only the strategies and ploys of his enemy but also his own flaws and weaknesses.

This particular time and place fascinate me. The cold war is ramping up. Dirty deals abound while deviltry floats in the air or can be found around any corner. It was a crucial time in history and shaped much of what happens today throughout the world. And the story mixes intrigue and romance. Will the hero find his love plus uncover the plot? The suspense can’t be beaten.

As a woman physician/scientist coming up through the ranks of a male-dominated profession and working for the federal government in the 1970's, 80's and 90's, just as the "sisterhood" characters did, I identified deeply with many of the characters' experiences, and was surprised to learn that what they experienced in the intelligence community was very similar to what I had experienced in my own field in the federal government. Learning these stories of female spies explained a lot about the ways that my own career was directed, and it made me feel a sisterhood with the women described in the book, whose courage and lives are brought to light after having been hidden so many decades. Quite apart from that, it is a great read - exciting, disturbing in parts, uplifting in that these women soldiered on to the point that they made enormous contributions despite having been shunted to… show more.