14 Best Alistair MacLean Books

A film crew sails to remote Bear Island in the Arctic to shoot a war movie, but people start dying before they even reach land. Ship’s doctor Marlowe probes the killings and uncovers buried wartime crimes that someone is still desperate to keep hidden.

Years after hearing his family murdered over an aircraft radio, John Talbot stages a wild courtroom escape and kidnapping that seems like pure madness. In reality he is steering a gang of killers toward an offshore wreck, where revenge and buried evidence collide.

A battered light cruiser escorts an Arctic convoy toward Murmansk while its exhausted crew fight mutiny, ice storms and relentless German attacks. MacLean turns the voyage of HMS Ulysses into a bleak, gripping portrait of endurance on the edge of collapse.

A US nuclear submarine is sent under the Arctic ice to rescue survivors from a burning weather station. Dr Carpenter boards as a mysterious specialist, but hidden agendas, sabotage and Cold War secrets turn the mission to Ice Station Zebra into a lethal chess game.

Interpol narcotics agent Paul Sherman arrives in Amsterdam to follow a lead on a vicious heroin ring. With two female colleagues, he wades through crooked cops, canal ambushes and betrayals, knowing the smugglers will murder anyone who threatens their lucrative pipeline.

On a German-held Greek island, massive coastal guns block the rescue of 1,200 stranded British soldiers. A small Allied commando team must scale an "unclimbable" cliff, cross enemy territory and sabotage the fortress before the Royal Navy sails into range.

A hand-picked Allied commando squad parachutes into the Bavarian Alps to snatch an American general from the mountaintop fortress of Schloss Adler. As bodies fall and loyalties blur, Major John Smith and Lt. Schaffer must untangle a web of double agents to escape alive.

When a jet airliner crash-lands on the Greenland ice cap, a remote research team rescues the survivors—then realises a murderer is among them. With their radio destroyed, they must trek hundreds of kilometres through Arctic night while hunted for a deadly secret.

February 1942: as Singapore burns, soldiers, nurses and civilians escape aboard a shabby freighter, only to be hunted across the South China Sea. Shipwreck, open boats and a hidden traitor turn their desperate flight toward Java into a brutal test of nerve.

A luxury cruise ship that also carries cargo steams through the Caribbean with nervous officers, strange new passengers and rumours of a missing tactical nuclear weapon. When hijackers strike at sea, chief officer Johnny Carter must fight back before the Campari and everyone aboard are sacrificed.

A British agent slips behind the Iron Curtain to snatch an elderly scientist out of Soviet-controlled Hungary. Michael Reynolds must outwit the secret police, survive a frozen landscape and decide whom he can trust in a country seething after revolution.

Two deadly biological agents—including the unstoppable "Satan Bug"—are stolen from a British research base. Security man Pierre Cavell hunts the saboteur through layers of deception, racing to stop a fanatical blackmailer from unleashing a germ that could wipe out humanity.

Secret agent Philip Calvert prowls the stormy waters off Scotland, posing as a marine researcher while investigating a string of vanished bullion ships. In a maze of fake customs officials, hostile locals and a fortress on the cliffs, every ally may be lying.

Fresh from silencing the Navarone guns, Mallory and Miller are dropped into war-torn Yugoslavia with a new team and a vague brief. Surrounded by partisans, Chetniks and Nazis, they must rescue missing agents and turn a looming German offensive into a disaster.