March MysteryKIT: Spies, Lies and Ciphers

Sorry for posting so early. I'm having major surgery tomorrow so will be in hosptial for 3 to 5 days if all goes well.

March MysteryKIT is all about espionage.



Any book to do with spies, ciphers. Have fun!

>1 majkia: Take care.

Planning to read a classic of the genre for the first time with Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios (which is, I am learning from the touchstones, the US title for a book originally published as The Mask of Dimitrios).

I think A River in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters involves spies of some sort.

Hope your surgery goes well.

Hope you are recovering nicely!

I will try to read Churchill's Secret Messenger: A WW2 Novel of Spies & the French Resistance by Alan Hlad This was a rec from a lady I work with.

I am reading Legend in Green Velvet for our one of my on-ground reading groups. It includes all three--spies, lies, and ciphers.

I am planning on reading The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler.

I will most likely read the next book in the Robert Langdon series Inferno.

>1 majkia: Hope your recovery is going well.
I am thinking something by John Le Carre - we will see.

Yes, le Carré is also my preferred choice for this, unless I get sidetracked into something else.

I think I will tackle another Agatha Christie, maybe The Man in the Brown Suit.

It occurs to me that Arcadia by Iain Pears belongs here. One plotline involves spywork and the hunt for a mole in MI5.

Thanks for kind thoughts. I'm recovering from a triple bypass so it'll be awhile before I'm back to strength

Good luck with your recovery, Jean. Please do not overdo things on our account.

>14 majkia: Good luck, hope you heal well and quickly!

Well, "spies" doesn't work in a tagmash! There are apparently some words in some kind of void when one tries to use them in a tagmash and this is one of them.

Luckily, I know that Kate Quinn tends to write historical fiction with women spies, so it looks like I'll plan to read one of hers:
The Briar Club.

Rhys Bowen has written the Royal Spyness series that would work.

>18 LadyoftheLodge: Thank you for this reminder.

When I got excited about Kate Quinn, it didn't occur to me that there were probably way too many holds at the library for this to come in for me anytime soon. I may do the next (for me) in the Royal Spyness series instead.

I don't have much about spies on my shelf, but I think I've found one, Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings. The blurb says it involves Hawaiian royalty and political intrigue.

>6 Tess_W: Last May our family was on cruise and we went to Normandy. We also visited the Churchill War Rooms which is a museum in London. It was very interesting and large. I had forgotten it was in London.

>21 mnleona: Yes, I was there also (2005).

I have completed my read of The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler.

Hi all. I'm home from rehab and making good progress in getting better, but finding it difficult to concentrate on screens or pages. So if there is an issue with this thread or the AlphaKITs threads, please let me know with a private message and i'll do my best to address it.

>24 majkia: Good for you. It will take some time but you can do it.

I read The Devil's Steps by Arthur W. Upfield, in which spies and espionage figure prominently in the plot.

>24 majkia: Glad you are recovering from your surgery. It takes a while to recover concentration but don't worry, it will come. Wishing you all the best.

I read The Secret Hours by Mick Herron
Although a standalone novel, it benefits from a prior reading of the Slough House series featuring the Slow Horses. Lengthy and somewhat complicated, it was thoroughly entertaining and fun. This is where it all began. Good, but Slow Horses was fantastic.

I read The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler by John Hendrix A graphic novel that explains the life of Bonhoeffer for those aged 10-13

I have read A Murder of Quality, a George Smiley book, by John le Carré but it's more a murder-mystery than it is an espionage book.

I've picked up In True Face by Jonna Mendez, CIA Master of Disguise, where she recounts her experience as a technical operator. I had the privilege of hearing her speak and I'm loving her story, from the incredible work that she did to how she overcame the misogyny in a field that was overwhelmingly male. A great read for both Women's History Month and espionage!

I read Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon. Was there a mole?

I have finished Montezuma’s Revenge where an unlikely FBI agent is roped in to acquire a Da Vinci painting looted in WW2 and gets embroiled with various secret services in Mexico.

I've finished Joe Country by Mick Herron. Still my favorite spy series.

I read Cause for Alarm by Eric Ambler. My copy has a line on the cover stating it is "The greatest spy novel of all time." I haven't read enough spy novels to say that I would agree, but I did end up enjoying this more than I expected.

COMPLETED The Vienna Connection by Dick Rosano. It's a mystery/thriller. The lead character used to be an elite interrogator with the US Army and has an almost preternatural ability to tell whether somebody is lying.

The April thread is up: https://www.librarything.com/topic/369239

This is stretching it... it is tagged "spies", but I think that's more for the series as a whole, not this particular book, but I'll use it here, anyway. If I thought I'd have more time to get to a different book, I might read something else instead, but I won't get to another one for the MysteryKIT this month.

Rabbit Hole

At risk of spoiling some details in the story, it does fit this category, but I won't say any more!

This story starts on the ten-year anniversary of the disappearance of our main character's sister, Angie, when Teddy was 16 and Angie was 18. On this day, the anniversary of the disappearance, Teddy's father commits suicide. As she cleans out her father's office, which used to be Teddy and Angie's shared bedroom, Teddy finds the notes her father left behind as he continued to investigate Angie's disappearance — and stumbles upon 'true crime' communities on places like Reddit, and all the comments they have made about her, her sister, and their family.

I'm not a huge mystery reader, so others may have different experiences, but I found the reveals satisfying. Sometimes I would put the pieces together a few paragraphs before Teddy did, and sometimes I was totally surprised but could see all the clues in hindsight. Generally, after reading a few chapters, my heart was thumping and my mind was racing. I did cry a few times during this book!

Teddy is the kind of main character who is in a really tough situation and doesn't handle it perfectly. At times I felt that I might have done the same things she did, but at other times I felt her actions were completely unjustifiable and made her less sympathetic. If that is the sort of book that can't hold your interest, I would recommend skipping this one. I also want to note that it had a lot more graphic sex scenes than is to my taste.

However, overall this was a very gripping mystery, investigating ideas like who our family really are and who a tragedy belongs to.

I've finished Dead Lions by Mick Herron, the 2nd book in the Slough House series.

I have finished Smiley’s People which I enjoyed immensely.

Finished The Director by David Ignatius.

The Light of Day is more of a heist caper, but since our narrator Arthur Abdel Simpson runs up against the Turkish counter-espionage service in this story, I think it counts.

>41 MissWatson: Agreed.

And I finished another classic of the genre, Eric Ambler’s Cause for Alarm.

I finished Above Suspicion - by Helen MacInnes an early thriller by her set just before WWII.

60. Inferno by Dan Brown ★★★½

Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon awakens in a hospital in the middle of the night. Disoriented and suffering from a head wound, he recalls nothing of the last thirty-six hours, including how he got there or the origin of the macabre object that his doctors found hidden in his belongings. Langdon's world soon erupts into chaos, and he finds himself on the run in Florence with a stoic young woman, Sienna Brooks, whose clever maneuvering saves his life. Langdon quickly realizes he is in possession of a series of disturbing codes created by a brilliant scientist - a genu=ius whose obsession with the end of the world is matched only by his passion for one of the most influential masterpieces ever written - Dante Alighieri's dark epic poem The Inferno. Racing through timeless locations, Langdon and Brooks discover a network of hidden passageways and ancient secrets as well as a terrifying new scientific paradigm that will be used either to vastly improve the quality of life on Earth or devastate it.

The fourth book in the series is not as interesting or as entertaining as the previous books. While I still enjoyed Robert Langdon, I could not get interested in the search or the stories behind Dante's Inferno.