Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine’s
Best Espionage Fiction of 2024
by George Easter, Jeff Popple
and Larry Gandle
We are spy fiction aficionados and want to give that subgenre some equal footing with the other year-end “best” lists that can be found posted on www.deadlypleasures.com. We lost our most knowledgeable espionage fiction contributor, Steele Curry, who recently passed away. He will be sorely missed, but we will try to carry on despite his absence.
Some of our favorite spy writers, such as Mick Herron, Charles Cumming, Paul Vidich and John Lawton, didn’t publish any 2024 titles – but they will all be back in 2025 with new books for our enjoyment.
A 2023 title that we all like a lot was THE PEACOCK AND THE SPARROW by I.S. Berry and it was published in the U.K. in 2024. It won a ton of awards including our Barry Award. So if you are a reader living outside of the U.S. you might want to include that title on your own best of 2024 list.
Best Espionage Novels of 2024
THE SEVENTH FLOOR by David McCloskey. A Russian arrives in Singapore with a secret to sell. When the Russian is killed and Sam Joseph, the CIA officer dispatched for the meet, goes missing, operational chief Artemis Procter is made a scapegoat for the disaster and run out of the service. Months later, Sam appears at Procter’s doorstep with an explosive secret: there is a Russian mole burrowed deep within the highest ranks of the CIA. As Procter and Sam investigate, they arrive at a shortlist of suspects made up of both Procter’s closest friends and fiercest enemies. The hunt requires Procter to dredge up her checkered past in the service of the CIA, placing the pair in the sights of a savvy Russian spymaster who will protect Moscow’s mole in Langley at all costs. What happens when friendships forged by sweat and blood – from the Farm to Afghanistan and the executive “Seventh Floor” of CIA’s Langley headquarters – are put to the ultimate test? What can we truly know about the people we love the most?
FIRST STRIKE by Stephen Leather. MI5 analyst David White has always tried to be a good father, so when his daughters want to go to a music festival in Israel, he agrees to take them. But his world falls apart when his daughters are killed in the Hamas massacre that left 1,200 innocent civilians dead. White is taken hostage down in the tunnels under Gaza, and Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd and a crack SAS team are sent in to rescue him. Safely back in London, White is a changed man. He wants revenge for what happened to his family and sets out to kill the men who planned and financed the Hamas attacks. And as White embarks on a vengeance-driven killing spree, Shepherd is the only man who can stop him.
A RELUCTANT SPY by David Goodman (U.K. only so far). The story revolves around the central conceit of the Legends Program, a secret British intelligence effort to prepare impenetrable backstories for undercover agents. It uses real people, living low-key real lives, who are willing to hand over their identities, so that an agent can become them for a few weeks in order to go undercover. In return, the real ‘legends’ are given a helping hand with plum jobs, influence and access, and a stress free holiday while someone else is using their identity.
Jamie Tulloch is a successful executive at a top tech company, a long way from the tough upbringing that drove him to rise so far and so quickly. He has also been a member of the Legends Program since he was 23, getting a nice kick along in his career in the process.
After years of waiting, he is finally activated by British Intelligence. Arriving at a French airport ready to hand over his identity, Jamie finds his primary contact murdered in a toilet, the agent who’s supposed to step into his life AWOL, and his options for escape non-existent. In desperation, he uses the ticket meant for the fake Jamie Tulloch, and steps onto the plane as himself, and heads to Zanzibar. Once there he becomes caught up in a dangerous operation involving Russian mercenaries, a rogue general, and an infamous arms trader.
THE WEALTH OF SHADOWS by Graham Moore. 1939. Ansel Luxford has everything a person could want—a comfortable career, a brilliant spouse, a beautiful new baby. But he is obsessed by a belief that Europe is on the precipice of a war that will grow to consume the world. The United States is officially proclaiming neutrality in any foreign conflict, but when Ansel is offered an opportunity to move to Washington, D.C., to join a clandestine project within the Treasury Department that is working to undermine Nazi Germany, he uproots his family overnight and takes on the challenge of a lifetime.
THE SCARLET PAPERS by Matthew Richardson. Published first in the U.K. in 2023 to great acclaim. Now available in the U.S in 2024. VIENNA, 1946: A brilliant German scientist spirited out of the ruins Nazi Europe in search of a new life. MOSCOW, 1964: A rising star of the British diplomatic service whose job is not what it seems. LONDON, THE PRESENT DAY: A once promising academic offered an opportunity to seal his place in history. Their stories, their lives, and the fate of the world, are bound by a single document: THE SCARLET PAPERS.
THE BEST REVENGE by Gerald Seymour (U.K. only) is the fourth entry in his series about the nondescript MI5 agent Jonas Merrick. Generally despised and overlooked by his superiors and flasher younger colleagues, and not really forgiven for unmasking a Russian spy in MI6 in The Foot Soldiers, Merrick has been banished to the Chinese desk with instructions not to ruffle feathers. But while Merrick seems to be a harmless old fellow waiting for retirement, underneath he is very astute and quite ruthless in his determination. When he stumbles upon a Chinese network, which is targeting a young naive expert in GPS-free missile guidance systems, he sets in place a devious operation that has the potential to strike a blow to China’s espionage network in the UK. One thing that Merrick is unaware of, however, is an operation against himself by the Russians who have been given the instruction from Putin to ‘bring me his head’.
Honorable Mentions
KARLA’S CHOICE by Nick Harkaway
PHANTOM ORBIT by David Ignatius
GABRIEL’S MOON by William Boyd
THE SHAME ARCHIVE by Oliver Harris
A DEATH IN CORNWALL, Daniel Silva (also an art mystery)
ILIUM by Lea Carpenter
SHADOW OF DOUBT by Brad Thor
THE TRAP by Ava Glass
THE LAST HOPE by Susan Elia MacNeal