A member of the homicide department of the people's militia, State Security Officer Brano Sev is sent to the village of his birth to interrogate a potential defector, but his mission is complicated by a murder in which he becomes the prime suspect.

The Vienna Assignment

Olen Steinhauer

Literature & Fiction

Harpercollins

This is a beautifully written new thriller from the acclaimed Cold War series writer. Prague, 1968: Peter Husak, a young student, is captured as he tries to flee the country in the wake of Russia's suppression of Czechoslovakia's fledgling freedom movement. Seven years later, a People's Militia homicide investigator with defection on his mind boards a plane for Istanbul. When it is hijacked by Armenian terrorists, the Turkish authorities try to establish contact - but the plane explodes in mid-air. There is no negotiation, no explanation. Why? Two investigators are assigned to the case: Gavra Noukas, a homicide detective who lives a dangerous double-life, and Brano Sev, an experienced secret policeman loyal to the state. Both believe their superiors are keeping them in the dark, but they can't work out why. As they start unravelling the elaborate mystery, though, a trail emerges -- one leading back to a seven-year-old murder, a seemingly insignificant killing with terrifying consequences.

The Istanbul Variations

The Tourist

Minotaur Books

THE VIENNA ASSIGNMENT.

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

Harper

In this auspicious literary crime debut, an inexperienced homicide detective struggles amid the lawlessness of a post-World War II Eastern European city. It's August, 1948, three years after the Russians "liberated" this small nation from German occupation. But the Red Army still patrols the capital's rubble-strewn streets, and the ideals of the Revolution are but memories. Twenty-two-year-old Detective Emil Brod, an eager young man who spent the war working on a fishing boat in Finland, finally gets his chance to serve his country, investigating murder for the People's Militia. The victim in Emil's first case is a state songwriter, but the evidence seems to point toward a political motive. He would like to investigate further, but even in his naivete he realizes that the police academy never prepared him for this peculiar post-war environment in which his colleagues are suspicious or silent, lawlessness and corruption are the rules of the city, and he's still expected to investigate a murder. He is truly on his own in this new, dangerous world. The Bridge of Sighs launches a unique series of crime novels featuring a dynamic cast of characters in an ever-evolving landscape, the politically volatile terrain of Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.

Bridge of Sighs

Mystery

William Heinemann, Ltd.

<p>The small, unnamed Eastern bloc country of Olen Steinhauer's debut novel The Bridge of Sighs is making its first tentative steps towards democracy. By command of the party chairman, the labour camps are being emptied of innocent civilians. The amnesty has begun.-But life isn't easy for the celebrated author, Ferenc Kolyeszar. He suffers from writer's block; the gnawing suspicion that his wife, Magda, is cheating on him with his best friend and partner, Stefan; and a malaise that has affected his day job as a homicide inspector. Then the artist Anton-n Kullmann is found dead, his arms and legs shattered, his body set on fire. It's an exceptionally brutal murder.-Peeling off the layers of deception and duplicity that surround the case, Ferenc discovers a secret that has ruined the lives of three men, and could ruin the lives of many more, particularly his own.-As the country moves from a tenuous democracy into an even more totalitarian state, Ferenc learns what it means to be betrayed, what it means to be the betrayer.</p>

The Confession

Heinemann

36 Yalta Boulevard (St. Martin's Minotaur Mysteries) [UNABRIDGED]

Contemporary

Blackstone Audiobooks

Eastern Europe, 1956. Comrade Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar - a proletariat writer as well as a state militia homicide detective - is a man on the brink. Estranged from his wife, whom he believes is cheating on him with one of his colleagues, and frustrated by writer's block, Ferenc focuses his attention on his job. But his job is growing increasingly political . . .

Thorndike Press

In Olen Steinhauer’s bestseller The Tourist, reluctant CIA agent Milo Weaver uncovered a conspiracy linking the Chinese government to the highest reaches of the American intelligence community, including his own Department of Tourism---the most clandestine department in the Company. The shocking blowback arrived in the Hammett Award--winning The Nearest Exit when the Department of Tourism was almost completely wiped out as the result of an even more insidious plot.Following on the heels of these two spectacular novels comes An American Spy, Olen Steinhauer’s most stunning thriller yet. With only a handful of “tourists”---CIA-trained assassins---left, Weaver would like to move on and use this as an opportunity to regain a normal life, a life focused on his family. His former boss in the CIA, Alan Drummond, can’t let it go. When Alan uses one of Milo’s compromised aliases to travel to London and then disappears, calling all kinds of attention to his actions, Milo can’t help but go in search of him. Worse still, it's beginning to look as if Tourism's enemies are gearing up for a final, fatal blow.With An American Spy, Olen Steinhauer, by far the best espionage writer in a generation, delivers a searing international thriller that will settle once and for all who is pulling the strings and who is being played.An American Spy is one of The New York Times Notable Books of 2012.

An American Spy

Hotkey

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Books by Olen Steinhauer