Martin Cruz Smith Books in Order

This anthology edited by Martin Cruz Smith gathers classic and contemporary spy stories about betrayal, double agents, and dangerous secrets. From nineteenth-century tales to Cold War capers, it offers tightly plotted glimpses of the shadow world that shaped much of Smith’s own fiction.

In an alternate America where a united Indian nation controls the continent’s heartland after Little Bighorn, old treaties are fraying. As Washington eyes the “empty” plains and both sides become nuclear powers, politicians, soldiers, and ordinary families are dragged toward another, possibly final, frontier war.

Romano Grey, a New York gypsy and antique expert, is shaken when a friend dies in a car crash and is posthumously accused of butchering a young woman. To clear the dead man’s name, Grey navigates police suspicion, Romani loyalties, and the darker corners of the antiques trade.

Roman Grey is asked to help guard the Royal Crown of Hungary during its exhibition at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. When the impossible happens and the crown vanishes amid murder and chaos, Grey must untangle rival claims, old war crimes, and a centuries-old secret hidden in the jewel itself.

Set in the fevered world of early-1970s Washington, this offbeat thriller follows a young political insider whose strange intuitions pull him into a plot that mixes campaign spin, experimental technology, and the possibility that not everything in the corridors of power can be rationally explained.

AXE agent Nick Carter is “loaned out” to the KGB to guard a Soviet minister touring Chile, along with a new bulletproof evening suit. What looks like glorified bodyguard duty becomes a frantic race to stop a coup that could set South America ablaze.

Nick Carter, code-named N3, is sent to smash an international opium pipeline nicknamed the Devil’s Dozen. Chasing smugglers from seedy ports to chic resorts, he battles traffickers and traitors whose drug profits are funding a much wider and deadlier political game.

Ordered to protect a firebrand cardinal under threat, Killy finds himself in a cloistered world of Vatican intrigue, hired killers, and whispered stories of a ghostly avenger. Guarding his charge means uncovering who wants the prelate dead, and whether the haunting is a mask for murder.

A terrorist group plans an attack codenamed Nuplex Red, a strike designed to kill millions. Racing from European capitals to secret labs, Killy chases the bomb while confronting a terrible choice, the key conspirator may be a man who once saved his life.

Francis Xavier Killy, lay brother and covert agent for the Vatican, is sent to a Kansas war college where foreign officers keep turning into murderous dictators back home. Undercover as a trainee, he uncovers brainwashing experiments, Cold War power games, and a battle for his own mind.

Killy’s new assignment targets a charismatic ex-priest whose religious movement is sweeping France. As he probes miracles, paramilitary camps, and a cult of personality, Killy must decide whether he is fighting heresy, raw ambition, or something far more dangerous than either church or state expected.

An old monk is found murdered, peach blossoms scattered around his body, and a Japanese businessman soon dies in equally puzzling fashion. Tracing both deaths back to an aging ex-mobster seeking redemption, Killy navigates Yakuza grudges, Church politics, and the price of buying one more chance at grace.

After a terrorist gang murders his wife and children in Naples, NATO computer specialist John Kinsdale abandons procedure and turns hunter. Following a trail of coded messages and political blackmail across Italy, he wages a one-man war to find the killers before they strike again.

Francis Xavier Killy, former CIA agent turned lay brother for the Vatican’s Militia Christi, is sent to investigate a fanatical religious sect and a planned train robbery of a fortune in gold. The mission forces him to weigh obedience, vengeance, and the sins he is supposed to punish.

Tired of smog and city strain, Skip Robinson moves his wife and children from Los Angeles to a remote valley in the Rockies. Building a cabin from scratch, the family discovers both the wonder and the real dangers of wilderness life, from blizzards to hungry bears.

On a remote reservation in the Southwest, an aging shaman calls on a death god, and mutilated bodies soon appear beneath storm clouds of vampire bats. Deputy Duran teams with outsiders to confront a plague-bearing swarm, old grievances, and the clash between modern science and sacred tradition.

In this Slocum western written by Martin Cruz Smith, gunfighter John Slocum gets pulled into a blood feud on the frontier. As ambushes and double-crosses pile up, he has to decide how far revenge can go before it costs a man his soul.

In Soviet-era Moscow, homicide investigator Arkady Renko is called to Gorky Park, where three mutilated corpses lie with faces and fingerprints removed. His search for their identities pulls him into black-market deals, Cold War politics, and a deadly transatlantic conspiracy.

At Los Alamos in 1945, Pueblo Indian ex-boxer Joe Peña works security for the Manhattan Project while running side hustles and double-checking for leaks. As he juggles romance, tribal loyalties, and a high-stakes boxing match, the first atomic test at “Stallion Gate” looms over every choice.

Disgraced and exiled from Moscow, Arkady Renko is gutting fish on the Arctic factory ship Polar Star when a young crew member turns up dead in the nets. Ordered to call it an accident, he instead probes a murder in claustrophobic, international waters.

Back in a crumbling Moscow on the eve of the 1991 coup, Arkady Renko investigates the fiery death of a black-market dealer known as Red Square. The trail of smuggled art and dirty money drags him to Berlin, Munich, and a dangerous reunion with an old lover.

In 1870s Wigan, coal-mine engineer Jonathan Blair returns from Africa broke and despondent, then is hired to find a vanished curate engaged to his patron’s daughter. Teaming up with fierce pit-brow girl Rose, he digs into a mining disaster, class tensions, and the rot beneath a Victorian town.

Grieving and half broken, Arkady Renko flies to Havana to identify the body of a Russian official pulled from the bay. The trip drops him into Cuba’s decaying beauty, secret police games, and a murder that tangles together Russian exiles, revolutionaries, and his own will to live.

On December 6, 1941, Tokyo bar owner Harry Niles has twenty-four hours to get out of Japan. Fluent in the culture yet forever an outsider, he dodges police, a furious samurai officer, and tangled love affairs as war closes in on every escape route.

When a billionaire businessman jumps from a Moscow high-rise, Arkady Renko notices one odd detail, a wardrobe full of salt. His questions lead from post-Soviet boardrooms to the radioactive ghost city near Chernobyl, where old secrets, new profiteers, and feral wolves share the same poisoned ground.

Reports of Joseph Stalin’s ghost haunting a Moscow subway platform are supposed to be a harmless publicity stunt for Arkady Renko to tidy away. Instead he uncovers rigged politics, Chechen war veterans with blood on their hands, and buried crimes stretching back to his own father’s generation.

At Moscow’s chaotic Three Stations Square, a teenage mother’s baby vanishes and a young prostitute is written off as an overdose. Suspended yet again, Arkady Renko digs into the cases anyway, threading through runaway kids, gangsters, and a powerful casino owner who wants him bought or silenced.

An investigative reporter named Tatiana falls from a Moscow balcony in an apparent suicide, just as a mob-connected billionaire is buried like royalty. Listening to her recordings and chasing a coded notebook to Kaliningrad, Arkady Renko unravels a story Russia’s elites are desperate to keep buried.

In the last months of World War II, Venetian lagoon fisherman Cenzo pulls a young Jewish woman from the water and chooses to hide her from the Nazis. Their flight through occupied Italy tangles them with partisans, collaborators, stolen gold, and a fragile, unexpected love.

Arkady Renko travels to Siberia hoping to meet Tatiana Petrovna, who has disappeared while reporting on a jailed opposition politician. Amid oil oligarchs, pet tigers, and lethal wilderness, Arkady must decide whom to trust and how far he will go to protect both truth and the woman he loves.

Now older and unsteady on his feet, Arkady Renko is drawn into the disappearance of an anti-Putin activist linked to protests in Kyiv’s Maidan. Following clues from Moscow to Crimea, he treads a thin line between loyalty, surveillance, and the coming war in Ukraine.

Russia’s war on Ukraine rages as Arkady Renko, now living with Parkinson’s disease, investigates the shooting of a defense official in Moscow’s grand Hotel Ukraine. Surrounded by spin, fear, and old enemies, he fights his failing body to uncover who ordered the killing, and why.