Showing results by author "Robert Littell" in All Categories

From youth to adulthood, Rob Littell spent 20 years alongside John F. Kennedy Jr.—through laughter and sorrow, joy and heartbreak. In this moving and poignant memoir of their touching friendship, Rob Littell himself shares his story with listeners.

It's a deadly dilemma for Martin Odum: both remembering and forgetting his past are dangerous options. A discharged CIA agent turned private detective, Odum is struggling through a labyrinth of memories from past identities, "legends", in CIA parlance. Is he really Martin Odum? Or is he Dante Pippen, IRA explosives specialist? Or Lincoln Dittmann, Civil War expert? Or another, hidden legend?

The Company tells the thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an enemy that is amoral, elusive, and formidable. It also lays bare a warfare within the company itself, adding another dimension to the spy vs. spy game. The Company tells the thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an enemy that is amoral, elusive, and formidable. It also lays bare a warfare within the company itself, adding another dimension to the spy vs. spy game.

Charlie Heller is an ace cryptographer for the "Company." He's a quiet man with a quiet job in a back office. But when terrorists kill his fiancé in cold blood and the Agency decides not to pursue those responsible, Charlie's life takes an abrupt turn. He was not a blackmailer, but he will force the CIA's hand. He was not an assassin, but he will penetrate the Iron Curtain with the intent to kill. Driven by an obsessive need for revenge and targeted for elimination by the CIA itself, Heller is an amateur with a one-in-a-million chance of success.

In love with Katushka—a beautiful prostitute who may be his ally or his betrayer, Stone, an American agent trained in the most sophisticated methods of debriefing, must uncover every detail about the life of Kulakov, a highly placed Russian courier who wants to defect to the United States.

An elite plan is afoot, a plan so secret and dangerous that its existence is known only to a tiny group of specialists within the innermost core of the CIA. There is virtually no paper trail—but somehow the plan has sprung a leak, and the plotters must urgently plug it—or face deadly consequences. As clandestine worlds collide, the present faces the past, and disturbing moral choices are weighed against a shining patriotic dream. What is the truth? Whose truth should be believed?

When Til returns from America to Petrograd on the eve of the October Revolution in 1917, it is to put his life on the line in the hope of transforming Russia. But after witnessing the birth of a new era, he watches the people, and his own ideals, trampled by the rise of Josef Stalin—with whom Til is destined to have a shattering confrontation.

On Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a ten-minute televised speech announcing his resignation as Soviet president. Moments later, with little pomp and less circumstance, the red flag was lowered from its floodlit perch atop the Kremlin, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Into the vacuum—before a new democracy had time to put down roots—surged the Russian mafia, supplying what the new state could not: krysha, or “roof”—protection for the privately owned businesses sprouting across the country.

A.J. Lewinter is an American scientist, for years an insignificant cog in America's complex defense machinery. While at an academic conference in Tokyo, Lewinter contacts the KGB station chief and says he wants to defect. He tantalizes the Russians with U.S. military secrets he claims to possess, but is his defection genuine? Neither the Russians nor the Americans are sure.

The New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell presents a suspenseful and brilliantly topical new thriller that looks at the cycle of political violence in the Middle East. In the near future, an unprecedented Arab-Israeli settlement is brokered by a visionary female president of the...

Crisis constantly lurks around the corner, monitored by spies who are always with us. In this breathtaking thriller, a spectacular mole hunt is under way, one that involves not just the CIA—"The Company" to insiders—but Mossad, MI6, and the KGB as well. Robert Littell, master of the espionage novel, has crafted an exciting story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an enemy that is amoral, elusive, and formidable. The Company also lays bare a warfare within the CIA itself, adding another dimension to the spy vs. spy game.

On Saturday, January 13, 1917, an ocean liner docks in New York Harbor. Among the disembarking emigrants is one Lev Davidovich Bronshtein—better known by his nom de guerre, Leon Trotsky. Bronshtein has been on the run for a decade, driven from his beloved Russia after escaping political exile in Siberia, his companion and two sons in tow. He lives and would die for a worker’s revolution, at any cost—but is he ready to become an American?

The most elite levels of the CIA's Counterintelligence unit are on the verge of pulling off an operation so huge it will change global politics—and so secret that it has no paper trail. But the operation's organizer, Roger Wanamaker, has evidence that the plan has sprung a leak. Now it is a deadly race against time to "walk back the cat"—isolate the leak and plug it—before the scheme is exposed and an international conflict is ignited.

A riveting thriller about crime and punishment in Soviet-era Moscow. Like the Arkady Renko novels of Martin Cruz Smith, Robert Littell's masterful Mother Russia transports listeners back in time and behind the Iron Curtain to experience the extremes of Soviet society.

Robert Littell is often compared to John le Carre, Alan Furst, and Len Deighton. But in Sweet Reason, this master of the spy genre takes a dramatic departure to brilliantly satirize career militarists and other absurdities of war.

The Stalin Epigram is a masterful rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, one of Russia's greatest poets of the 20th century. His heroic protest against the Stalin regime---particularly his outspoken criticism of the collectivization that drove millions of Russian peasants to starvation---finally reached its apex in 1934. When he composed a searing indictment of Stalin in a 16-line poem, secretly passed from person to person through recitation, the poet was arrested.

It is the height of the Cold War, and Francis and Carroll—two CIA "legends" dubbed "The Sisters Death and Night” by their associates—plot the perfect crime. They deftly lure The Potter—former head of the Russian's KGB espionage school—into revealing the identity of his most talented student, an assassin called “The Sleeper.” The Sisters covertly send the Sleeper on a treacherous and near-impossible assignment, while the Potter races against time stop his protégé from committing the Sisters' exquisitely planned crime.

After the sudden death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors, young Leon Rozental - intellectually precocious and possessing a disarming candor - is hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, a large building in Moscow where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work. One day, after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards.

Robert Littell has made a name for himself as one of the foremost authors of literary spy thrillers. Here, Littell abandons his usual East European milieu to focus on New Mexico, where a Sovietera KGB agent, code-named Parsifal, has been living under deep cover. Reactivated by a new controller for some particularly brutal "wetwork"—murder—Parsifal's suspicions are aroused. Fearing a double-cross, he begins, in espionage lingo, "walking back the cat"—retracing the operation to find the source of the deception.

Connoisseurs of the literary spy thriller rank Robert Littell, the bestselling author of The Company, with John le Carré, Graham Greene, and Alan Furst in the first tier of the genre's pantheon. Set against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Prague, The October Circle is one of Littell's most riveting early works. Seven of Bulgaria's cultural elite—all disillusioned communists—and one American drifter find themselves staging an extremely dangerous protest that will set off a wave of repression and threatens to repay their heroism with death.