Alistair MacLean is a Scottish writer who specialized in writing thrillers and crime stories. He was third son of a Scottish minister and joined the Royal Navy during the world war two. He was a senior torpedo operator at the height of his career. He was in the thick of the war theater during the world war and saw action on many fronts especially the arctic north. After retiring he started penning his novels based on the war he saw and many of them became best sellers. Maclean never looked back as a writer until his death in 1987.
Ice Station Zebra is a British Meteorological Institute built on an ice floe in the Arctic sea. The authorities get the information that a catastrophic oil fire has swept through the ice station killing many of the crew and depleting supplies. The survivors holed up in the Arctic send an SOS to be rescued at the earliest because of the dwindling food supplies and injuries. Above all the vicious cold keeps the very survival at bay.
USS Dolphin an American Nuclear powered submarine is assigned to bring the survivors back. It is commanded by Captain Swanson a tough but capable officer. He is asked to take in Dr. Carpenter, a cold injury expert and is asked to follow his commands. Swanson hates to be kept in the dark and refuses to accept the order forcing Carpenter to reveal that he is a spy and Zebra to be a listening post against the Soviets.

So Dolphin sets sail and reaches the Arctic where thick ice cover prevents the submarine from surfacing. So they surface far away from the ice station and Carpenter and some crew trek through perilous Arctic landscape. Carpenter and his companions find the fire had indeed created havoc, with the dead burnt to crisp and the survivors at the door step of death. Further investigation reveal that the fire was a case of arson to camouflage murder and enemy spies.
Well so Carpenter treks back to the Dolphin and directs the submarine to a thin strip to surface near the ice station. But sabotage forces the shutting down of the nuclear reactor and the submarine is in danger of going down in the Arctic. Soon accidents happen with chilling regularity and fire engulfs the sub rendering it useless. But the ingenuity and dedication of the crew and Captain Swanson saves the submarine and it sets off to safer climes.
Carpenter unmasks the killers who are Russian Agents and avenges the death of his brother who was the commander of Ice station Zebra. The overwhelming factor in Ice Station Zebra is the bone chilling cold. The men fight mind numbing Arctic storms, frost bite and starvation to rescue others. The cold seeps through the pages,but blazes through the brain to give you an adrenaline rush. If you want a book which is a lean mean thriller minus sex, emotions and jargons you can go for Ice Station Zebra. The warning on the book will be “you will be cold to everything till you finish the book”.

Agatha Cristie had started with her first book published in 1920 (The mysterious affair at Styles), and wrote a number of books during her career. 2 of her main characters were the detectives – Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, but she also had novels that did not have these 2 characters. One of these was an early book of hers, called ‘The Secret Adversary’, published in 1922. The book introduces the character of Tommy and Tuppence who also features in other novels of hers. The book met with praise from critics on its release, and was later turned into a movie released in 1929, and also into a TV drama. One small problem was the book that there were a lot of cliched characters in the book, with many characters being obvious villains. The book was set in 1919 in London and other locations in Britain. It depicts a young couple Tommy Beresford and Prudence “Tuppence” Cowley, who offer themselves out as adventurers, since they have no money and no work. And there starts the adventure.

They soon find themselves stuck in a political and spying game, when they use the name of ‘Jane Finn’ for Tuppence; using this name Tuppence is rejected for a job (and they had over-heard this name in a conversation earlier); a person named Whittington hears scraps of their conversation and believes that they are blackmailing, and pays them some money for them to stop using their information (information that they do not possess). However, when they realize that they can get more information from Whittington, they find that he has vanished. Knowing that the name of ‘Jane Finn’ seems to be causing this search, they put an ad in the paper with the same name, and get a response from a Mr. Carter, who tells them the background to what Jane Finn actually was, and the significance of the name to intelligence agencies. They are contacted by more people, including police officials (and they realize that they had also been contacted by a villain earlier). The rest of the story is about contact with these secret agencies, with bolshevik agents out to topple the British government, and so on.

Mother Night is partly a war story, and a spy story (with the syping done during the war), but is more than that. It does not do much about fighting, or about combat, more about the life of a playwright who lives a double life as a spy, and ends up at the end of the war as a shell. The book is a depiction of the plight of the person who ends up with a double identity at the end of the war, a spy who survived the war (not something that a lot of spies did), who feels that he is nationless now, and cannot find anything worthwhile to have as a means of living (the one true love he had, his wife, died during a war battle). In the end, you end up with a person who has no will to live. Part of the message of the book is ‘you end up being what you pretend to be’, and and hence people should be very careful about whatever they try to become.

The story (written in first person) is about this guy called Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American citizen who moves to Germany after World War 1. He stays on in Germany after Hitler comes to power in 1933, and since he is a playwright, he continues to write plays. He associates with members of the Nazi Party, and cares for 2 people – his plays, and his wife Helga (also the actress of his plays). Soon, he has an encounter that sets the stage of the remainder of his life. He meets with a man called Frank Wirtanen, from the US War Department (the US Government did not have a separate spy agency at that point of time), who asks him to become a spy of the US. Campbell refuses, but Frank tells him to think it over.
As the war starts, Joseph Goebbels is the propaganda minister for the Nazis, the one who turned the art of propaganda into a convincing weapon; part of Goebbels assignment is to convert enemies to their cause, and Campbell becomes a part of that effort, rising in esteem and becoming more and more allied to the effort. He would be reviled for his role as a loyal supporter of the Nazis, and criticized as a war criminal. However, Campbell is also a spy for the US, working for the OSS (Office of Strategic Service – the agency that later became the foundation for the CIA), passing on messages through his speeches; however, Campbell does not know the content of the messages he is passing.
However, in the middle of the war, he gets a real shock, when his wife Helga is presumed dead when she was caught in a camp (where she was entertaining German troops) which was over-run by the Soviet Army. Later, near the end of the war, he has a slightly unpleasant conversation with his father-in-law, in which his father-in-law basically tells him that he always suspected that Campbell was a spy, but he was good at his propaganda work that it over-shadowed everything else he may have done. When he is captured by US forces, he gets released due to the efforts of Wirtanen.
Campbell moves to New York City, living a lonely life without any adventure, until there is a confluence of events. He is sought by a Soviet agent looking to re-build his career, by a white supremacist, by the FBI, by the sister of his wife, and by Nazi hunters. He however is almost beyond caring.
Eventually, there is a sequence in which he gets caught by Nazi Hunters, and taken to Israel. What happens to him, to a person who is beyond caring, but who was not a war criminal, but instead a spy who was very effective.

The Bourne Identity is an extremely famous novel (although it never was made into a good movie – even the movie of the same name starring Matt Damon changed the story and somehow did not appeal to Ludlum fans). The Bourne Identity has been acknowledged as one of the better spy novels of all time (published in 1980). The concept of a man, who does not know who he is, but knows for sure that he was somebody whom people are hunting in a very determined manner, and who keeps on running and running in order to find out who he is (at the same time, running away from his pursuers) makes for a very fascinating story. Throw in the US Government agencies, throw in Carlos the Jackal, and throw in a romance, and you get a very gripping book.

The first in a series of 3 written by Robert Ludlum (the others being The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum) and 2 more books in the same series written by Eric Van Lustbader written after Ludlum’s death, you should ideally read the whole series and then you will admire the way that Robert Ludlum spins a fast-paced thriller.
The book starts with a man picked up from the Mediterranean Sea by a fishing boat and brought to a local doctor, a former good doctor, but now mostly a drunk. His body has many bullets in it, and in order to save him, the doctor gives up his drink for some time, and then saves him. It takes some time to recover, but the patient finally recovers. He soon discovers that he has amnesia, does not remember who he is, but there are some interesting circumstances around him – he has had signs of plastic surgery, and also surgically implanted in his body is a microfilm with the details of a Swiss account with 4 million dollars. Soon the patient also discovers that he has the instinct of a skilled fighter, when he has a fight with a local; as a result of this fight, he needs to leave fight.
He eventually gets to the Swiss Bank in Zurich, and soon discovers a name, Jason Bourne. This may or may not be his name, but he has to struggle when people at the bank know who he is, when he himself does not know who he his. And from this time, he is now a marked men when people get to know that he is alive. He struggles to stay away from them, and soon he takes a woman hostage, Marie St Jacques. He is now thoroughly enmeshed in a struggle with people (who may be from the famous Carlos the Jackal); he also has to face the possibility that he may be himself an assassin. The circumstances seem to point out that. But he also shows a very positive side to his character when he saves Marie after she is abducted and marked for killing.
As the plot progresses, you get to know more facts. He is / was an agent of the US Government, but then suddenly disappears, and then his prints appear at a location where some US agents are killed. Based on medical advice, the US now believes that he has turned hostile and needs to be hunted down. How can he stay one step ahead of his pursuers and make his former controllers believe that he did not turn, but instead lost his memory ? Read the novel to find out.