78 Books Like Castro's Secrets

This book by Mario Vargas Llosa explores the last days of the Dominican Republic's Trujillo dictatorship. I really enjoyed this novel for its blending of historical facts with fiction and for providing a detailed depiction of Rafael Trujillo's regime, its impact on the country, and his assassination in 1961.

The narrative combines three storylines: The character of Urania, who returns to the Dominican Republic after many years in the United States, and shows us the long-lasting psychological impact of Trujillo's rule on her and her family. Trujillo’s last days, personality, control over the country, and the loyalty and fear he commanded. Finally, the group of people plotting to assassinate Trujillo, their motivations, fears, and actions show us that freedom is one of our most valuable treasures worthy of risking our lives.

Vargas Llosa's detailed and compelling narrative profoundly examines how dictatorial regimes can distort societies and damage lives.

This book takes a comic yet piercing look at espionage. 

Jim Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Cuba, is recruited by MI6 out of desperation and fabricates his spy reports. He invents agents, sketches of weaponized vacuum parts, and absurd clandestine plots—all to keep the money coming and satisfy his daughter’s extravagances.

What makes the novel shine is its satire of the spy apparatus—how credulity, vanity, and bureaucratic inertia turn fiction into danger. Greene balances light humor with real human stakes: financial strain, moral compromise, a man pretending to be something he is not. Even decades after its writing, Our Man in Havana remains sharp, funny, and deeply relevant in its critique of power, truth, and illusion.

This is both your main course and palate cleanser. Absolutely riveting!

Critically underrated and largely unknown but described by up-and-coming writer Stephen King (in 1983) as “the Jane Austen of the political espionage story,” Ross Thomas was rumoured to have been an ex-spook himself. For those that haven’t read him, the best way I can describe his writing is: hilarious, clever, cynical, and like Elmore Leonard had a baby with Graham Greene.

Missionary Stew sees political fundraiser, Draper Haere, and “almost-Pulitzer winning” journalist, Morgan Citron, wrapped up in a caper involving the CIA, cocaine traffickers, Latin American generals, and corrupt US officials, all trying to fund a coup in a fictional Central American country. A storyline that might sound like it’s based on a true story—the Iran-Contra Affair. The only hitch is Missionary Stew was published in 1983 while Iran-Contra first came to light in 1985. Prophetic or insider knowledge?    

I have read several John Le Carre novels, but I chose this one because of its ingenious depiction of the psychological traps of spydom.

It’s a satire, and as it moves through a mire of lies and deceit, it digs deeply into the twists and turns of the life of a tailor seemingly forced by bribery and blackmail to be a spy. His only freedom is to release his creativity into a vast new domain of endless deceit, in which, among other things, he drenches his handler with lies.

The story is brimming with surprises, including the fact that there’s no violence, which is one of the reasons I liked it so much. I read this one twice, years ago, and both times, I could barely take a break.

Dwight D. Eisenhower served two terms as United States president, from 1952-1960. His administration is widely remembered for rapid economic growth and adept international diplomacy. Yet the pubic face of much of that growth and diplomacy masked Ike’s vehement prosecution of a brutal cold war—acts of attrition and deceit overseas that vastly expanded the US empire around the globe.

The brothers John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and Allen Dulles, who was head of the Central Intelligence Agency, led the American rise to international preeminence. The Devil’s Chessboard focuses largely on Allen Dulles, who waged secret wars across the planet in service of American imperial objectives. Prior to World War Two, Dulles worked for an investment firm that had direct ties to Hitler’s Third Reich—Allen Dulles met with Hitler in 1933. During the war, Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and was… show more.

Whenever anyone writes about Dallas, Texas, odds are it’s going to include the rich, the seedy, and a murder.

In this case it’s the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But this book is so much more.

It’s a history of the moneyed-powerful and the stepped on in early 1960s Dallas, setting up an understanding of how this murder that shook the world was destined to happen in the Lone Star State.

And it’s a book I have been recommending for 10 years, not simply because it’s a riveting read, which it most definitely is, but because—despite the passage of 60 years—it’s a reflection of the U.S. today.

Director Oliver Stone based his 1991 movie JFK on the failed late 1960s JFK assassination probe of New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison. In this investigative book, Lambert methodically deconstructs Garrison’s investigation and exposes it as a total fraud. Her prodigious original research both archives and interviews is woven into a faced-paced book that is utterly convincing.

The late New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison pursued the only criminal case in this controversy that has tried someone for conspiracy to murder Kennedy in court. He faced death threats, prosecution, infiltration, dirty tricks, and more in the late 1960s. He details what he went through and why he mostly blamed U.S. intelligence officials and agents for what he called a “coup d’etat.” His book was a major basis for director Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK, in which Garrison played a minor role as Justice Earl Warren.

A veteran Texas journalist who started teaching a course on the assassination at UT-Arlington in 1976, Marrs saw his comprehensive work published a year after Garrison’s book. Stone also used Marrs’ book as a prime source for his movie. Unlike Garrison, Marrs steered clear of pinning the assassination on mostly one group, covering the alleged roles of organized crime, anti-Castro Cubans, the military-industrial complex, oilmen, bankers, political opponents, and more. Some 25 major publishers turn down Marrs’ manuscript, which became a best-seller, before Carroll & Graf accepted it. The work was one of the first to tie together the various alleged conspiratorial groups.

Author Priscilla McMillan was at the crossroads of history. She worked as a junior aide for Senator John Kennedy before she went to Moscow as a reporter during the height of the Cold War. There, in 1959, she interviewed an American marine who had recently defected to the Soviet Union. He was Lee Harvey Oswald. After JFK was killed in 1963, McMillan befriended Oswald’s widow, Marina, and spent hundreds of hours interviewing her. The result of McMillan’s unprecedented direct access to the Oswalds is an unmatched personal study of a troubled young man who turned into one of history’s most notorious assassins.