10 Historical Thriller Books We Can't Put Down

It is 1792 and Europe is seized by political turmoil and violence. Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in Radical circles who eagerly await updates on the ongoing French Revolution in the hopes of inspiring a similar movement on their side of the channel. 

But Lizzie's loyalties are tested. She has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who is heavily invested in Bristol’s housing boom. Any sort of social uprising would hurt his bottom line. Diner believes that Lizzie’s independent, questioning spirit must be coerced and subdued. She belongs to him, according to the law, but Lizzie won't be so easily silenced. More than her own life is on the line, after all.

With World War II finally ending, Jake Geismar, former Berlin correspondent for CBS, has secured a press slot for the Potsdam Conference, where the three leading Allies are set to announce their plans for post-war peace and serenity. But it's all a handy front for Jake to find Lena, the German mistress he left behind at the outbreak of the war. 

When Jake stumbles on the murder of an American soldier whose body washes up on the conference grounds, he thinks he's found the key to his great story. Instead, he finds a barely hidden web of corruption eaching deep into the heart of the occupation. The war is over but the fights continue, and the victors are preparing for the next war, one they'll win at any cost.

On a cold and wet Winter night in 1809, an unconscious man is carried into a house in Somerset. He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain's disastrous campaign against Napoleon's forces in Spain. Lacroix's body recovers but not his mind, as he finds himself haunted by the ravages of war he saw from the frontlines. 

After the command comes to return to his regiment, he sets out instead for the Hebrides to find some semblance of peace and immerse himself in the local folk music tradition. But a vicious English corporal and a Spanish officer are on his trail, with orders to kill him on sight.

In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested and falsely accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must figure out a way to survive as the country collapses around them. 

His wife tries to find him, all while fearing that their once-trusted housekeeper is the one who sold Amin out in the first place. His daughter tries to rebel while his son, sent to New York before the rise of the Ayatollahs, struggles to fit in with a new country that views him with suspicion.

Kurt Nordstrum, an engineer in Oslo, gives up his comfortable life to take up arms against the Germans as part of the Norwegian resistance during the Second World War. He commandeers a ship and escapes to England to transmit secret evidence of the Nazis’ progress towards an atomic bomb at an isolated factory in Norway. He then joins up with a team of fellow Norwegians who are training in the Scottish highlands to fight back and destroy the Nazis' plans for further annihilation. 

Nordstrum and his team attempt the most daring raid of the war, targeting the heavily-guarded factory built into the rock that is meant to be totally impenetrable. There's no guarantee they'll survive, but if they don't, the whole world could be at stake.

The Central Intelligence Agency, known as the CIA to the rest of the world and the Company to those in the know, is at the heart of foreign intelligence and covert action in the American government. Their power stretches far and wide across the decades and every corner of the planet. 

Robert Littell's The Company follows a treacherous hunt for a mole in the agency. The Calabrian is a mysterious hitman who has been ordered to assassinate the new Pope just 33 days into his papacy. Three best friends - Jack McAuliffe, Leo Kritzky, and Yevgeny Tsipin - graduate from Yale and prepare to go their separate ways; Jack and Leo to the CIA and Yevgeny to the KGB. 

They find themselves at the center of every major world even for the next 50 years, and through it all, there is a traitor in their ranks. In the CIA, the ends justify the means, even if that involves dabbling in pure evil. But where does it end?

It is 1946, and Adam Miller has come to Venice to visit his widowed mother and try to forget the horrors he has witnessed as a U.S. Army war crimes investigator in Germany. The reverberations of war continue to haunt him and everyone he knows, including Claudia, a Jewish woman who Adam meets and falls in love with. 

Through her, he finds himself forced to confront the true darkness of Venice. Everyone in this beautiful city, including his mother's dashing new suitor, has been compromised by the occupation, and for many of them, it's as though the war never truly ended. Adam finds himself at the center of a web of deception and forced to wonder the seemingly unacceptable: Is murder ever justified?

Inspector Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted to Chief Superintendent, is about to take a well-earned holiday. His older brother Rod has decided to take his entire family on "the Grand Tour" for his fifty-first birthday, traveling across mainland Europe and visiting some of its most beautiful locations. But Troy only gets as far as Vienna. 

It is there that he crosses paths with an old acquaintance, a British spy turned Soviet agent named Guy Burgess. He’s surprised to hear that Burgess wants to come home to the UK, but that’s easier said than done, and as Troy is hoping to fix things, an MI5 agent is shot dead and he becomes the prime suspect. He must fight to prove his innocence and uncover a scandal that has its roots in the highest levels of power in Westminster.

Grey is a young Englishwoman who has come to Tokyo in the hopes of finding a lost piece of film footage of the notorious 1937 Nanking Massacre. Some say this footage has never existed but Grey is unconvinced. The only person who can help her is a survivor of the massacre who is now a visiting professor at a university in Tokyo. 

But he will have nothing to do with her. So Grey must stay in the city, working in a nightclub, and find a way to convince the old man to trust her. But there are reasons that nobody wants her to dig up the relics of Japan's traumatic past.

In 1941 Germany, Klaus Felsen, an industrialist, is approached by the SS high command and "persuaded" to to go to Lisbon and oversee the sale—or smuggling—of wolfram, a material crucial for the manufacturing of weapons and vehicles for the Axis forces. 

During the Second World War, Portugal is a neutral country, but the Nazis are worried that too much of the precious metal they need is being sold to Britain over themselves. In Lisbon of 1999, Catarina Oliveira, the daughter of a prominent lawyer has been found dead on a beach. Ze Coelho, a liberal police inspector still mourning the passing of his wife, is called in to investigate. Everyone around her has secrets, from her mysterious father to her rockstar friends. The events behind her death will also reveal a shocking link to the past.