Jack Higgins’s 20 Most Famous Thrillers

The Nazis have cracked up an audacious plot to devastate the Allied war effort. The plan? To abduct Winston Churchill and send Great Britain into leaderless chaos. There’s only one thing standing in their way—The residents of the little town of Studley Constable. 

If you read just one Jack Higgins book, this should be it—The Eagle Has Landed has sold over 50 million copies worldwide, and was adapted into a 1976 film starring Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland. It also introduces his most famous character—former IRA gunman Liam Devlin.

Written and published more than a decade before his hit The Eagle Has Landed, The Dark Side of the Island already shows Higgins in full command of his art, reminding us that “the name Jack Higgins on a book means adventure fiction at its best” (Memphis Commercial Appeal). 

During World War II, Hugh Lomax helped to take out a high-tech German radar station on the Greek island of Kyros – and was captured and imprisoned for his trouble. Twenty years later, he’s back to try to clear his name and discover who it was who betrayed him and his friends. There’s just one problem: They’re still waiting, and watching, and closer than he thinks.

May 1944. A colonel, one of the few men with foreknowledge of the impending D-Day invasion, has been stranded behind enemy lines. His safety—or at least silence—is imperative; the course of the war and the fate of all of Europe is at stake. 

And so begins a bold, impossible mission; to infiltrate Nazi territory and retrieve the colonel before the Allied secrets are forced out of him. Like so many of Jack Higgins’ action novels, this one was adapted into a movie—a 1990 film starring George Peppard and Michael York.

High in the Himalayan mountains, former naval pilot turned smuggler Jack Drummond finds himself delivering the most precarious cargo of his career. He had hoped to hang up his wings and retire, but instead he finds his plane in flames as he attempts to deliver a sick young boy across the mountains overland – a journey that will be fraught with dangers in addition to the unforgiving landscape. 

It seems that the boy is more than he appears, and there are men after him who are willing to kill. Can Drummond make it to safety with the child in tow, or will this mission prove to be his last?

In the chaos of the fall of Berlin in 1945, Martin Bormann—Chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery and signatory of Hitler’s final will and testament—disappeared. A fellow Nazi claims that he saw Bormann’s body in the chaos of the fall—but if that’s true, where is it? 

Thirty-one years later, the government of West Germany has given up their search. But a journalist has managed to piece together the scraps of evidence around Bormann’s disappearance—and the real hunt is just about to begin, revealing a conspiracy of epic proportions.

An American bartender and a Jewish nightclub singer working in Lisbon might not be the heroes that one expects to foil a Nazi plot. But when the two of them catch wind of the Nazi scheme to kidnap the Duke and Duchess of Windsor while they are visiting “The City of Seven Hills,” they’re determined to do whatever it takes to rescue the British royalty from Nazi machinations. 

Theirs is a race against time that has the power to turn the tides against the Nazis in their quest for European domination. The 1984 film adaptation of To Catch a King stars Robert Wagner.

“Open a Jack Higgins novel and you’ll encounter a master craftsman at the peak of his powers,” raves the Sunday Express, and it’s not hard to see why if you’re paging through this classic thriller about an ex-con prowling through London’s seedy underbelly – and the cop who will stop at nothing to catch him. 

The Graveyard Shift was the first book to introduce Higgins’ recurring hardboiled detective character Nick Miller, who would subsequently appear in two more thrilling novels before Higgins retired him in favor of other protagonists.

In Korea, Martin Shane and five other soldiers found themselves captured and tortured by a sadistic colonel. One of them broke, betraying the others to save his own skin. Martin Shane never learned who it was, because a piece of shrapnel stole his memories. 

Now, however, after years in an institution, he’s himself again. He still doesn’t know who betrayed him, but he’s going to find out, and when he does, he’ll carve out his vengeance—no matter what it takes in this searing novel from “a thriller writer in a class of his own” (Financial Times).

Sometimes, having friends in low places comes back to bite you. Liam Devlin’s former IRA compatriot-turned-terrorist-for-hire, Frank Barry, is preparing to steal a deadly missile and sell it to the highest bidder, and Devlin is the only one who can take him on. He’ll need help from an old ally, Martin Brosnan—who’s been imprisoned for the past four years on an island in the Mediterranean. 

So, sure: jailbreaking might be the first step along the way. But as Devlin knows, you can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs. A New York Times bestseller!

“The action is sleek and intensely absorbing” raves Publishers Weekly of this New York Times bestselling book which marks the eighth installment of Jack Higgins’ most popular character – IRA gunman turned British enforcer Sean Dillon. 

This time around, he’s teaming up with an ex-FBI agent who is on a mission of revenge against an international crime boss in a breakneck thriller that takes them around the globe to shut down an illegal business empire and face an enemy every bit as ruthless and driven as they are. Will Dillon and his new companion be able to come out on top? There’s only one way to find out…

A rogue terrorist is on the loose in Northern Ireland. He’s known only as Cuchulain, after the most fearsome warrior in Irish lore. His trail of destruction has gone on for over 20 years when he sets his sights on a holy target—the pope himself. 

Desperate and in far over their heads, British Intelligence calls on former IRA gunman Liam Devlin to take down the most dangerous man on the Emerald Isle. Another Higgins thriller that made its way to the screen, Confessional was the basis for a 1989 BBC miniseries starring Keith Carradine and Robert Lang.

Sean Dillon is back in “a hard-to-lay-aside thriller” (Associated Press) that “will keep you turning the pages” (USA Today) until the “satisfying, suspense-filled” conclusion (Roanoke Times). 

As a deadly female assassin targets the members of a secret IRA faction, the entire Irish peace process hangs in the balance. It’s up to Sean Dillon and Blake Johnson, the head of a clandestine White House bureau, to try to stop her before she finishes her kill list… and there are only a few names left.

Martin Fallon was a ruthless hitman for the IRA. After a mission goes wrong, he decides to walk away from his life of violence—but not before being blackmailed into one last hit. And for the first time, Fallon has a witness—a priest. 

His employers want Father De Costa dead, but Fallon makes a choice that could cost him everything: to protect the priest, in the hope of achieving redemption for the copious blood on his hands. If you can’t get enough of Martin Fallon, check out the 1987 film starring Mickey Rourke and Alan Bates, plus Cry of the Hunter, also featuring this roguish anti-hero.

“One-hundred-per-cent-proof adventure” is what a Jack Higgins book promises (New York Times), and that’s what he delivers in this classic adventure yarn about two bush pilots in the Amazon who embark on a mission to save a pair of nuns from a dangerous indigenous tribe. 

Already, a field of slaughtered missionaries lies in their wake, and they’ll have to work fast and survive the perils of the jungle – and each other – if they don’t want to add more bodies to the mix in this exciting book from “the master craftsman of good, clean adventure” (Daily Mail).

Joseph Campbell once wrote that the hero has a thousand faces. In a Jack Higgins novel, the night does, too. At least, that seems to be the case for Hugh Marlowe, a man fresh out of prison. He's trying to lay low but nonetheless finds himself in the crosshairs of danger as the small farm collective where he’s working comes under fire and he crosses paths with his duplicitous former partners in this exciting early novel that already shows that “Higgins is a master of his craft” (The Daily Telegraph).

When Simon Vaughn entered the high-risk, high-reward world of arms dealing, he made his bed—and now he’s being made to lie in it, in a prison cell in Greece. But sometimes there is a need for a man with Vaughn’s skills and expertise. 

Enter the British Army, who are desperate to retrieve a half-million dollars-worth of gold stolen by the IRA, and willing to give Vaughn an opportunity to get out of prison. All he has to do is lay his life on the line—and do the dirty work the Brits won’t risk taking on themselves.

Years before he had established himself as a master of suspense with such classics as The Eagle Has Landed, Jack Higgins made his debut with this thrilling adventure story that already showcases what readers have since come to expect from him – “first-rate tales of intrigue, suspense and full-on action” (Sunday Express). 

In this case, that means the story of a fortune in gold lying at the bottom of a lagoon in southern China. Mark Hagen is a smuggler who has had a run of bad luck, but he thinks his luck has turned around when he learns about the treasure. There’s just one problem: He’s not the only one who’s after it…

The year is 1980, and the piano-virtuoso-cum-assassin John Mikali makes a mistake he’ll come to regret. While fleeing the scene of his most recent hit, he kills a bystander to protect his identity. 

Little does he know that the young woman was the daughter of a special forces soldier who’ll stop at nothing to avenge her—and now, he’ll find himself locked in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse.

Also released as A Candle for the Dead, The Violent Enemy sees Jack Higgins setting his inimitable sights on a story of conflict and betrayal set amidst the Troubles in Ireland. Sean Rogan is a former member of the IRA, convicted of staging jailbreaks for his comrades. 

He’s waiting for a pardon when the fighting is over, but instead he gets a jailbreak of his own, as his former commander needs him on the outside to help hijack a load of paper money marked for destruction. Once out, however, Rogan will find that the world has changed, and the people he thought were his friends may no longer be quite so friendly.

Set in 1980s Paris and New York City, A Season in Hell is chock-full of blood, vengeance, and international intrigue. Bodies have been surfacing across Europe. The official cause of death? Drug overdose. But for the loved ones of two of the deceased, that answer just isn’t good enough—especially when it comes to light that the corpses may have been used to conceal contraband in an international drug trafficking scheme. 

Enter the unlikely partnership between Wall Street lawyer Sarah Talbot and British Special Air Service-trained Sean Egan. Their mutual desire for vengeance drives them to face off against an unstoppable European drug cartel, and could cost them their lives.