The Real Book Spy’s December 2022 Reading Guide

As the year comes to an end, there are still a few noteworthy thrillers set to hit bookstores—and we have all the details below!

After an incredible year of high-octane thrillers, 2022 is finally coming to a close. While this month is a little light in terms of volume, there are some really strong titles coming out, including this month’s Featured Selection, Tom Clancy Red Winter by Marc Cameron, which follows a young Jack Ryan set in the mid-1980s.

We’ll also be filling out December with a bunch of recaps and other coverage, including some sneak peeks at January, which is jam-packed with must-read thrillers.

Happy Reading!

 

 


Tom Clancy Red Winter by Marc Cameron (Featured Selection)

Available: December 6th

In this previously untold adventure, a young Jack Ryan goes behind the Iron Curtain to seek the truth about a potential Soviet defector in the most shocking entry in Tom Clancy’s #1 New York Times bestselling series.

1985

A top secret F117 aircraft crashes into the Nevada desert. The Nighthawk is the most advanced fighting machine in the world and the Soviets will do anything to get their hands on its secrets.

In East Berlin, a mysterious figure contacts the CIA with an incredible offer—invaluable details of his government’s espionage plans in return for asylum.

It’s an offer they can’t pass up…if it’s genuine, but the risks are too great to blindly stumble into a deal. With the East German secret police closing in, someone will have to go to behind the Berlin Wall to investigate the potential defector. It’s a job Deputy Director James Greer can only trust to one man–Jack Ryan.

Ryan is a former Marine and a brilliant CIA analyst who’s been the architect of some of the CIA’s biggest coups but this time he’s in enemy territory with a professional assassin on his tail. Can he get the right answers before the Cold War turns into a Red Winter?

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Night Shift by Robin Cook

Available: December 6th

In this exhilarating medical mystery-thriller by Robin Cook, fan favorites Jack and Laurie are lured into the dark underbelly of hospital dangers when an internist is murdered.

Colleagues turned spouses Dr. Laurie Montgomery and Dr. Jack Stapleton already have their plates full with crazy work schedules and family pressures. The last thing they need is a murder. When Laurie’s longtime friend, by all accounts healthy Dr. Sue Passero, dies mysteriously in the hospital parking garage, an autopsy is required, which falls squarely under Laurie’s purview as newly appointed chief medical examiner. So when Laurie asks Jack to take special care with the case, he can hardly refuse.

With his curiosity sparked by the mystery around Sue’s death, the indefatigable Jack, compelled to resolve the case at hand, sets out to investigate on-site at Manhattan Memorial Hospital, even though it means blatantly defying the Office of Chief Medical Examiner’s rules. What started out as an inquiry into Sue’s tragic passing soon turns into a deadly and dangerous chess game between Jack and the clever and deranged killer, who might just administer another lethal blow if Jack isn’t careful.

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W.E.B. Griffin The Devils’ Weapons by Peter Kirsanow

Available: December 6th

Dick Canidy and the agents of the OSS scour war torn Poland looking for a rocket scientist who holds the secrets to the Nazis most dangerous weapon in this new entry in W.E.B. Griffin’s New York Times bestselling Men at War series.

April 1940. By terms of the Soviet Nazi Nonaggression pact, the two dictatorships divided the helpless nation of Poland. Now, the Russians are rounding up enemies of the state in their occupation zone, but one essential target slips away. Dr. Sebastian Kapsky had spent years working with Walter Riedel and Werner von Braun in the early days of rocket science, but as a man with a conscience he refused to continue when he saw the perversion of their work by the Nazis. That makes him the most knowledgeable person about German superweapons outside of Germany. 
 
The Germans want him. The Soviets are desperate to grab him, but Wild Bill Donovan knows there’s only one man who can find him in the middle of a war zone and get him out—Dick Canidy.

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A Hard Day for a Hangover by Darynda Jones

Available: December 6th

A Hard Day for a Hangover is another humorous installment in Darynda Jones’s wine mystery series deemed: “Laugh-out-loud funny, intensely suspenseful, page-turning fun.” ―New York Times bestselling author Allison Brennan

Some people greet the day with open arms. Sheriff Sunshine Vicram would rather give it a hearty shove and get back into bed, because there’s just too much going on right now. There’s a series of women going missing, and Sunny feels powerless to stop it. There’s her persistent and awesomely-rebellious daughter Auri, who’s out to singlehandedly become Del Sol’s youngest and fiercest investigator. And then there’s drama with Levi Ravinder―the guy she’s loved and lusted after for years. The guy who might just be her one and only. The guy who comes from a family of disingenuous vipers looking to oust him―and Sunshine―for good.

Like we said, the new day can take a hike.

The blockbuster conclusion to the bestselling Sunshine Vicram trilogy, A Hard Day for a Hangover will have readers laughing and cheering to the very last page.

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AMOK by Barry Eisler

Available: December 6th

When the government offers a twenty-six-year-old former Marine a five-figure payday, there’s only one question: Who does he have to kill?

1991. A restless young man called Dox is back home in Texas. His friends have missed him, and his mother and sisters need him. But after four years as a Marine and another two as a CIA contractor fighting the Soviet Union alongside the Afghan mujahideen, small-town life in Abilene is a suffocating dead end.

Another secret war, this one in Southeast Asia, offers a big payday and the solution to his family’s troubles. But secret wars are never what they’re billed to be, and Dox is about to get the education of his young life. Among the lessons―the only thing more dangerous than war is falling in love with your enemy.

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Three-Edged Sword by Jeff Lindsay

Available: December 6th

Wickedly funny. Wildly twisty. The new book from the master of the heist novel.

“A super-thief who leaves no trace.”—Andy Garcia

“An anti-hero for our times.”—Sarah Dunn

“A can’t-miss master.”—David Baldacci

Super thief Riley Wolfe can do it all. He is a master of disguise, can scale a wall, and can vanish into thin air (thick air, too). He uses these unique talents to rob the richest. But this time, it’s the most powerful who have him in their grips.

ONE MADMAN. TWO HOSTAGES.

It’s not just that the high-up, rogue government agent has abducted the only two people Riley loves: it’s the fact that Riley has to do the man’s dirty work to set them free. It’s something Riley ordinarily would find a modest day’s work, infiltrating a madman’s Soviet missile silo in one of the world’s most remote places, all to find a secret on a tiny flash drive—but he’s never had to race the clock like this.

SOMETIMES TRUTH CAN BE A THREE-EDGED SWORD.

From its vivid, remote locales to its John Wick-meets-Deadpool dialogue, this gripping heist novel from Jeff Lindsay, author of the Dexter series, is everything: an utterly escapist, must-read novel of espionage, thievery, love and betrayal. It twists, it turns, and keeps everything on the line until the very end. Even for Riley, it looks like this time, the only way out is through.

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Huron Nights by Landon Beach

Release Date: December 22

THE STUNNING SEQUEL TO THE AWARD-WINNING MYSTERY NOVEL HURON BREEZE.
 
Labor Day Weekend—one last taste of summer.

In the quiet, sunrise-side town of Hampstead, Michigan, Rachel Roberts descends the stairs in her beach house, ready to sit on the back deck, have a glass of wine, and feel the Huron breezes come in from the water as the stars start to glow in the night sky above.
But everything changes when she sees headlights coming down her driveway. As the vehicle approaches, she becomes both excited and puzzled. Excited, because the vehicle belongs to her friend, retired Hampstead P.I. Obadiah Ben-David. Puzzled, because she has no idea why he is paying her an evening visit.

She soon learns that death has returned to Hampstead.

There has been an apparent murder-suicide involving the dazzling, socialite couple Artie and Misty Jensen in their mansion located in the posh, gated, beach-side neighborhood of Falcon Crest, and Ben-David has been asked to lend a hand as Hampstead’s new P.I. has been called away to deal with a family emergency. Ben-David is confident that it will be a quick visit to Falcon Crest. Whereas the murder case last summer was mystifying and treacherous, this one seems to be straightforward. Nevertheless, he would like for Rachel to be a second set of eyes for him when he examines the crime scene.

She accepts.

She shouldn’t have.

For when the final days of summer arrive, the temperatures begin to cool . . . and the Huron nights heat up.

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Praised as “One of the hardest working, most thoughtful, and fairest reviewers out there” by #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Scottoline, Ryan Steck has “quickly established himself as the authority on mysteries and thrillers” (Author A.J. Tata). Steck also works full-time as a freelance editor and co-hosts the ThrillerTalk podcast when he’s not streaming and hanging out with his growing community on Twitch. His debut thriller, FIELDS OF FIRE, which #1 New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr says “will leave you speechless and begging for more,” is now available in bookstores. For more information, be sure to follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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