Fiction Mystery Mystery Thriller Thriller

Eye of the Needle

Name: Eye of the Needle
Rating: 4.21 (168800 reviews)
Author: Ken Follett

Ken Follett May 23, 1978

4.21 168.8k Ratings

Ongoing Status

37 Views

Start Reading

Synopsis

One enemy spy knows the secret to the Allies’ greatest deception, a brilliant aristocrat and ruthless assassin — code name: “The Needle” — who holds the key to ultimate Nazi victory.

Only one person stands in his way: a lonely Englishwoman on an isolated island, who is beginning to love the killer who has mysteriously entered her life.

All will come to a terrifying conclusion in Ken Follett’s unsurpassed and unforgettable masterwork of suspense, intrigue, and the dangerous machinations of the human heart.

Books similar to Eye of the Needle

Night Soldiers

★ 3.94

Alan Furst

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 work on a grand scale.

Red Storm Rising

★ 4.21

Tom Clancy

This is an alternate history novel of the mid-1980s that answers the question: What if the so-called "Cold War" had turned hot? What if militant Muslim fundamentalists blow up a vital oil complex in the USSR, turning an already critical fuel shortage into a catastrophe? Would the Russians then decide they have no choice but to seize Persian Gulf oil at any price? The result of a chain of events like this might well be that the United States and the Soviet Union engage in a conflict that takes on terrifying dimensions.

Think Fast or Die

★ 4.11

Simon W. Clark

How do you start a war?
Assassinate a prominent American arms dealer.
How do you deal with a growing threat of terrorism spread across the world?
Find black-ops agent Rick Jensen.

The covert terror cell with a clandestine leader that no government or agency can identify.
A Kurdish soldier slave who could hold the key to unmasking the mastermind terrorist.
Looted ancient antiquities funding terror on a mass scale.
The clock is ticking.
No rules except think fast or die…

Rick has narrowly escaped a hidden army base deep in the Pakistan desert. Injured and exhausted, he tackles a series of terror incidents starting with bomb plot that would kill ten thousand people. No one else can stop the cell.

A new handler is assigned to Rick who needs him fighting the terrorists in Syria.
He hates Syria but a new evil has arisen.
The assignment is non-negotiable. Director’s orders.

Rick plunges into a human trafficking operation which must be stopped. Sarya is trapped as a slave in a bidding war when Rick aids her escape. Together they search for a phantom cell leader that only she has met.

On a parallel assignment Rick investigates American Mullenger whose arms-dealing and smuggling has caught the watchful eye of the CIA. Rick and Sarya know the entrepreneur must be connected to the mastermind terrorist.

Join in on the break-neck journey from Pakistan, Syria through to Egypt and back again as Rick strives to defeat the deadliest cell that ever existed.

Millions of lives are at stake. Superpowers under threat.

Only one outcome can restore temporary peace and bring stabilisation.

The Day of the Jackal

★ 4.27

Frederick Forsyth

Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.

The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man.

One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.

The Odessa File

★ 4.14

Frederick Forsyth

The suicide of an elderly German Jew explodes into revelation after revelation: a Mafia-like organization called Odessa, a real-life fugitive known at the "Butcher of Riga", a young German journalist turned obsessed avenger...and ultimately, of a brilliant, ruthless plot to reestablish the worldwide power of SS mass murders and to carry out Hitler's chilling "Final Solution."

Corpus

★ 3.97

Rory Clements

1936. Europe is in turmoil. The Nazis have marched into the Rhineland. In Russia, Stalin has unleashed his Great Terror. Spain has erupted in civil war.

In Berlin, a young Englishwoman evades the Gestapo to deliver vital papers to a Jewish scientist. Within weeks, she is found dead, a silver syringe clutched in her fingers.

In an exclusive London club, a conspiracy is launched that threatens the very heart of government. When a renowned society couple with fascist leanings are found brutally murdered, a maverick Cambridge professor is drawn into a world of espionage he knows only from history books. The deeper Thomas Wilde delves, the more he finds to link the murders with the girl with the silver syringe - and even more worryingly to the scandal surrounding the Abdication . . .

Restless

★ 3.95

William Boyd

“I am Eva Delectorskaya,” Sally Gilmartin announces, and so on a warm summer afternoon in 1976 her daughter, Ruth, learns that everything she ever knew about her mother was a carefully constructed lie. Sally Gilmartin is a respectable English widow living in picturesque Cotswold village; Eva Delectorskaya was a rigorously trained World War II spy, a woman who carried fake passports and retreated to secret safe houses, a woman taught to lie and deceive, and above all, to never trust anyone.

Three decades later the secrets of Sally’s past still haunt her. Someone is trying to kill her and at last she has decided to trust Ruth with her story. Ruth, meanwhile, is struggling to make sense of her own life as a young single mother with an unfinished graduate degree and escalating dependence on alcohol. She is drawn deeper and deeper into the astonishing events of her mother’s past—the mysterious death of Eva’s beloved brother, her work in New York City manipulating the press in order to shift public sentiment toward American involvement in the war, and her dangerous romantic entanglement. Now Sally wants to find the man who recruited her for the secret service, and she needs Ruth’s help.

Restless is a brilliant espionage book and a vivid portrait of the life of a female spy. Full of tension and drama, and based on a remarkable chapter of Anglo-American history, this is fiction at its finest.

The Bone Church

★ 3.84

Victoria Dougherty

In the surreal and paranoid underworld of wartime Prague, fugitive lovers Felix Andel and Magdalena Ruza make some dubious alliances – with a mysterious Roman Catholic cardinal, a reckless sculptor intent on making a big political statement, and a gypsy with a risky sex life. As one by one their chances for fleeing the country collapse, the two join a plot to assassinate Hitler’s nefarious Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Josef Goebbels. But the assassination attempt goes wildly wrong, propelling the lovers in separate directions.
Felix’s destiny is sealed at the Bone Church, a mystical pilgrimage site on the outskirts of Prague, while Magdalena is thrust even deeper into the bowels of a city that betrayed her and a homeland soon to be swallowed by the Soviets. As they emerge from the shadowy fog of World War II, and stagger into the foul haze of the Cold War, Felix and Magdalena must confront the past, and a dangerous, uncertain future.