Spy Novels

The fascists are taking over your country. The president is having judges arrested, sending citizens off to death camps in foreign countries, without due process, pulling international students out of their classrooms to either be sent off to the death camps, or to just go home, promises broken. What do you do?

I'll tell you what I do. I read spy novels from Nazi Germany. It somehow is the only thing I can do. I can't seem to write my fairy-tale book, or my family-history book, or my Texas Quaker novel. I just can't get into them when the country is going down in flames.

And furthermore, after having seen all the big social-media boys up on stage with him, I have trouble even putting things on social media that say "go to Amazon" or "go check out my Facebook page." It's lke I want nothing to do with them. Does that make any sense?

Ah but I will read a good spy novel, and I found some really good ones. Nazi Germany wasn't the same, quite, as what we're dealing with, but it's close. The sending off to camps of innocent people because of their race. An abuse of police power. The turning of state machinery into the spying on dissenters and brown people. It's close enough.

Here's what I've found:

books by Kate Quinn:
1. The Rose Code
2. The Alice Network

books by Richard Wake:
1. Vienna at Nightfall
2. Spies of Zurich
3. The Lyon Resistance
4. The Limoges Dilemma


Now I will say this. All six books are excellent. There are more in the Richard Wake series; it's just that I've only read the first four. Quinn focuses more on women and their role in the war, but she also has done a lot of research and that really shows through in her books; these two are the only ones I've found that are directly spy-novels. Wake, on the other hand, seems to be able to write spy novels 'til the sun goes down. So, I'll read them.

Fives for all six of them. They calm my nerves in troubled times.