From Russia with Love...or What's New in Spy Fiction

If you are intrigued by the world of spies but prefer to experience the dramatic twists and turns of their lives in novels rather than in the news headlines (!), these recent fiction titles  may be of interest to you.

Who Is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht
New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she's forced to take extreme measures to save herself.

The Deceivers by Alex Berenson
In the wake of a fatal incident in Dallas that may have been staged to look like a terrorist attack, former CIA agent John Wells is dispatched to Colombia to collect information from an old asset, a mission involving an audacious Russian plot that proves to be the most deadly of his career. By the Edgar Award-winning author of The Faithful Spy. 

The Kremlin's Candidate by Jason Matthews
Overhearing a Kremlin plot to install a spy in a high intelligence position so that the Russians can identify CIA assets in Moscow, Dominika launches a desperate mole hunt, only to be exposed and arrested before recklessly immersing herself in Kremlin palace intrigues in the hopes of stealing as much information as possible before her time runs out.
This is the third book in the Dominika Egorova and Nathaniel Nash trilogy. Start with Red Sparrow and follow it with Palace of Treason.

Need to Know by Karen Cleveland
A dedicated CIA counterintelligence analyst assigned to uncover the leaders of Russian sleeper cells in the United States stumbles on a secret dossier of deep-cover agents before facing an impossible choice that tests her loyalties to the agency and her own family. 

A Divided Spy by Charles Cumming
Former MI6 officer Thomas Kell takes the law into his own hands when an unexpected chance at revenge compels him to track a top Russian spy in possession of a terrifying secret, only to find himself embroiled in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse. By the best-selling author of The Trinity Six.