Here are 32 books that The Seventh Floor fans have personally recommended if you like
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With his depressingly accurate depiction of Britain and Europe in general, Charles Beaumont takes the reader on an intelligent and exciting tale of an investigation into a suspected Russian infiltration of the British government. Although the story invokes some of the classics, like Deighton or le Carré, A Spy Alone is in a class of its own. Beaumont is comfortable in his role as "a former turned author" who knows the business of spying and geo-politics as well.
It's an extremely well-founded story, totally plausible (if not true), with characters who show real personalities. His main man, Simon, is not world-weary, but has been around the block, rode hard, and put away wet. He's had many of his sharp edges ground down and realizes his world is not perfect but loves it nevertheless. Taut, engaging, confidently told, with twists and turns to satisfy almost any reader.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Michael Frost Beckner of SPY GAME screenwriting fame (memorably played by R.Redford & B.Pitt) has unleashed upon us another spellbinder -- actually, a series of spellbinders -- with his new work KALEIDOSCOPE. The first episode is titled "July 4th and true to Beckner’s previous works, this new series portends to be a wildly exciting dive down a rabbit hole replete with boobytraps, assassins, and lots of deception.
It is a (relatively) short but tantalizing novella that scratches out the history of a spy family as intriguing as Charles McCarry’s Christophers but perhaps more treacherous than the House of Borgia. The Kingston family harbors many secrets, has covers within covers, and knows the lies to answer any question.
It is the beginning of a twisted journey and ropes of sand, a wilderness of mirrors, the dancing lights, broken mirrors, and twisting figures of a kaleidoscope await the reader in a uniquely…
"KALEIDOSCOPE does for the CIA what THE SOPRANOS did for the mob." MICHAEL APTED, Academy Award nominated film director of COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, ENIGMA
With his critically acclaimed and award-winning Muir's Gambit, Bishop's Endgame, and Aiken in Check, novelist and screenwriter Michael Frost Beckner thrilled espionage fans worldwide with a return to his classic Robert Redford/Brad Pitt movie Spy Game.
Prepare yourself for Michael Frost Beckner's boldest experiment in espionage as Kaleidoscope expands the Spy Game universe with a multi-part saga of three generations of Kingstons—a CIA family trapped in the web of the Agency's…
CIA case officer Sam Joseph is dispatched to Paris to recruit Syrian Palace official Mariam Haddad. The two fall into a forbidden relationship, which supercharges Haddad's recruitment and creates unspeakable danger when they enter Damascus to find the man responsible for the disappearance of an American spy.
But the cat and mouse chase for the killer soon leads to a trail of high-profile assassinations and the discovery of a dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime, bringing the pair under the all-seeing eyes of Assad's spy catcher, Ali Hassan, and his brother Rustum, the head of the feared…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Gave intimate and lively insight into British spy efforts leading up to D-Day. Individuals and their personalities are engrossing. Added a lot to my knowledge of D-Day and who made it successful to Great Britain.
D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit, aimed at convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong invasion force.
The deception involved every branch of Allied wartime intelligence - the Bletchley Park code-breakers, MI5, MI6, SOE, Scientific Intelligence, the FBI and the French Resistance. But at its heart was the 'Double Cross System', a team of double agents controlled by the secret Twenty Committee, so named because twenty…
I am an aficionado of the fresh start. I make it a point to celebrate all the New Years—that way, I can re-up my resolutions every few weeks! Paradoxically, I’m not great at sudden change. I like stability and working systematically. I reconcile these two sides of myself by observing other people’s transformations and caterpillar-to-butterfly stories on a regular basis. Whether it’s Beyonce going country or a Nigerian god turning to crime, I’m on the ride, picking up pointers. If you are looking to make a change, I hope this list is a fun place to start gathering ideas!
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.
Bulgaria, 1934. A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalin's purges, Khristo flees to Paris. Night Soldiers masterfully re-creates the European world of 1934-45: the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for Eastern Europe, the last desperate gaiety of the beau monde in 1937 Paris, and guerrilla operations with the French underground in 1944. Night Soldiers is a scrupulously researched panoramic novel, a…
I used to be a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where I covered markets and economics. I had a front-row seat for the dot-com boom, the financial crisis, the rise of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and the 2020 crash. I was immersed in money and the culture of money, and how it drives and distorts society. I regularly talked to brokers, analysts, executives, investors, politicians, and entrepreneurs. I had billionaires’ phone numbers. And being around all that made me wonder, what is money, and why do we value it so? Why is the pursuit of wealth seen as a virtue? So I started studying our culture of money.
I started working for Dow Jones Newswires during the dot-com boom and saw how greed could drive markets. I worked through the housing boom in the Aughts and the financial crisis, and then started covering bitcoin around 2013. So by the time I got to Lewis’s book, I had a good understanding of how people can become obsessed with money.
But Lewis is just such a good writer, and has such insights into how markets work, that a book about bond buyers in the 1980s still feels like it’s about people trading so many other things today.
Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street's premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar's Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years-a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game…
I’ve been fascinated by thrillers since I was first allowed to read them. My childhood bookcase was full of Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, and every Nevil Shute novel. Later, these were joined by many others, not least John Le Carré. Banking gave me an insight into the murky world of money, bringing with it real-life stories as compelling as those I love reading about. My obsession with the genre is not only with elegant, complex plots but also with what motivates the characters to take the extraordinary risks they do in such challenging environments. The five thrillers I’ve chosen are my absolute favorites. I hope you enjoy them.
I absolutely love the portrayal of a deeply flawed character thrown into the murky world of espionage. For me, Magnus Pym epitomizes the double standards of British and American society, desperate to protect themselves during the Cold War while revealing the inner conflict between self, family, and country.
I also love how the tension builds and builds as Pym, the double agent, rises through the Secret Service and risks everything.
"The best English novel since the war." -- Philip Roth
Over the course of his seemingly irreproachable life, Magnus Pym has been all things to all people: a devoted family man, a trusted colleague, a loyal friend-and the perfect spy. But in the wake of his estranged father's death, Magnus vanishes, and the British Secret Service is up in arms. Is it grief, or is the reason for his disappearance more sinister? And who is the mysterious man with the sad moustache who also seems to be looking for Magnus?
As a former U.S. Army service member and a student of life, espionage and intelligence have often been staples in my research (as a creative writer), the cornerstones of my professional experience (as a combat veteran and slum baby), and a central theme in most of my novels. I’ve always enjoyed dissecting the inherent struggles of mankind and their inevitable fallouts—the pain, the joy, the misguided hopes and leaps of faith. Espionage and intelligence weaponize these sentiments. They transform them into actionable information and, sometimes, life-altering schemes.
That is what drives my work and sparks my interest in this subject matter: the psychological warfare we subject ourselves—and others—to.
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!
MI6’s man in Havana is Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true…
First published in 1959 against the backdrop of the Cold War, Our Man in Havana remains one of Graham Greene’s most widely read novels. It is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire of government intelligence that still resonates today. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by…
I liked the fact that despite everything that seemed to be going wrong, it all came right in the end and you ended up liking the most odious characters.
'To have been lucky enough to play Smiley in one's career; and now go and play Jackson Lamb in Mick Herron's novels - the heir, in a way, to le Carre - is a terrific thing' Gary Oldman
Slough House is the outpost where disgraced spies are banished to see out the rest of their derailed careers. Known as the 'slow horses' these misfits have committed crimes of drugs and drunkenness, lechery and failure, politics and betrayal while on duty.
In this drab and mildewed office these highly trained spies don't run…
Every day, we hear about crises worldwide and wonder what our government is doing to keep us safe and prosperous. Reality is often very different from what we see on the news. I was lucky to serve as a senior State Department diplomat and witnessed how the American government machine reacts to wars, coups, and political upheavals. Insights from the inside gave me both comfort (about the high quality of US officials), fear (about how many serious threats we face), and exasperation (at how messy things often get). When I left government, I wanted to share some of those frustrations and found fiction was the best vehicle.
The first in a series, this espionage thriller was written by a former CIA spymaster who uses his experience to tell the story of a Russian seductress targeting US officials. I was drawn in by the multi-layered protagonist, while the little details of spycraft enrich the plot and its authenticity.
THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE starring Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton and Jeremy Irons.
Dominika Egorov, former prima ballerina, is sucked into the heart of Putin's Russia, the country she loved, as the twists and turns of a betrayal and counter-betrayal unravel.
American Nate Nash, idealistic and ambitious, handles the double agent, codenamed MARBLE, considered one of CIA's biggest assets. He needs to keep his identity secret for as long as the mole can keep supplying golden information.
Will Dominika be able to unmask MARBLE, or will the mission see her faith destroyed in the country she has always passionately defended?
