One month before the 9/11 terrorist attacks reduced the World Trade Center to rubble, Jeffery Deaver was having lunch at Windows on the World, catching up on Big Apple gossip with the chef and waitresses. The 107th-floor eatery had once been Deaver's hangout during the years he worked nearby as a Wall Street civil attorney. Since leaving the practice to write full-time in 1990 and moving to Virginia five years later, Deaver had made a Windows lunch into a pilgrimage of sorts whenever he found himself in the city.

The image of the towers toppling in flames slapped most of us abruptly into the present. For Deaver, the tragedy sent him in the opposite direction.

"I was looking for types of evil to write about and I got to thinking that I would like to do a book about institutionalized evil," he tells BookPage. "The religious fundamentalist terrorist, the Islamic terrorist is overdone, and frankly it's not that compelling to me. I mean it's easy to take a child, brainwash them, strap five pounds of C-4 on them and go kill people. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. There's nothing interesting or compelling about that dramatically. I wanted to do more complex institutionalized evil, and decided that the phenomenon that contemporary readers would be most familiar with was Hitler and the Nazis."

Welcome to Garden of Beasts, Deaver's 19th novel and the biggest departure yet for the master of the ticking-bomb thriller. The son of a Chicago advertising copywriter, Deaver was already a successful New York journalist, poet and singer-songwriter (he still performs) when he earned his law degree with the intention of becoming a legal correspondent for The New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Instead, he hired on with a Wall Street law firm and used his long train commutes to hone his skills as a thriller writer. Garden of Beasts, which he sets in the foreboding milieu of pre-World War II Berlin, has all the trademark roller-coaster plot twists and double blindsides as Deaver's addictive Lincoln Rhyme series (The Bone Collector, The Vanished Man). There is one chilling difference, however: these horrors really happened.

Paul Schumann is a German-American mob hit man and World War I veteran whose deadly effectiveness is tempered by his conscience; he only takes "righteous" hits. When he's busted by the feds, he is presented with a choice: Sing-Sing or one last assignment to kill Reinhardt Ernst, the architect of Hitler's ruthless rearmament. If he succeeds, a pardon awaits, with enough money to pursue a legitimate livelihood.

"I was intrigued by the idea of creating a morally ambiguous character who nonetheless stays true to certain aspects of his personality," says Deaver. "For instance, he would not shoot down a woman and child in front of him to get at his target. He's smart, he's there on a good purpose, and he's motivated by his own self-preservation, but also because he sees the terrible things going on there and wants to do something about that. He doesn't really have a lot to lose, so it's easier to think, my God, he might not make it to the end of this book."

The premise echoes that of The Dirty Dozen, one of the many war movies that helped shape Deaver's narrative style. "I was born in 1950 and my father was a gunner in World War II, so the atmosphere of the Second World War was something that I was certainly aware of from my youth. And the war stories and the espionage stories particularly the movies of the '60s and early '70s, The Dirty Dozen and The Day of the Jackal were just superb," he says.

In the novel, Schumann poses as a journalist accompanying the U.S. Olympic team to the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin. In addition to providing an expeditious way to slip Schumann beneath the Nazi radar, the Games afford Deaver the opportunity to introduce his historical cast, which includes Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Goring as well as American gold medalist Jesse Owens. "Here was this country that was hosting this event to promote world brotherhood and sportsmanship, and all the while the camps were up and running and Jews and any political opponents were being systematically arrested and tortured and killed. What irony; here's Hitler and this magnificent stadium, I summon the youth of the world,' when meanwhile beneath the city dozens and dozens of secret prisons were operating."

When Schumann kills a storm trooper, it sets Inspector Willi Kohl of Kripo, the Berlin police, on his tail. A reluctant follower of the Third Reich, Kohl represents working-class Germans whose choices were few as the Nazis swept to power. Kohn trails Schumann to a military school where the psychological experiments of the new regime will horrify them both.

In one particularly chilling scene, Ernst returns home from a day of atrocities, kisses his wife and settles in to help his grandson build a boat, just another working stiff.

"The higher-ups knew exactly what was going on, and yet they would go home with this sense of, Well, I did a good job.' They didn't even have a sense that the rest of the world was condemning them for it. 'That was my job, I did it and I'm coming home to have schnitzel with my family,' " Deaver says.

Deaver admits he was surprised, and perhaps slightly complimented, to learn that German publishers had declined to release Garden of Beasts.

"They made me a very nice offer for my next two Lincoln Rhyme books (Gallows Heights is due in summer 2005), but they said we just can't publish this," he says. "That was their choice, of course, but I have to say the book was very accurate."

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

Perhaps like me, you've always wondered: do spies read spy novels? The answer in Stella Rimington's case is an enthusiastic yes. "Oh, very much," insists the first female director general of Britain's MI5 intelligence agency. "I am an avid thriller reader and always have been. That is rather odd actually, that somebody relaxes by reading fictional stories about their own profession, but indeed I do and always have."

Rimington was a diplomatic housewife living in India in 1965 when she was offered a part-time clerical position by the MI5 operative in New Delhi. "I was reading Kipling's Kim at the time and I somehow imagined that it was really going to be rather like the 'great game' that Kipling writes about," she says. "But it turned out not to be like that at all."

Upon her return to London, Rimington joined MI5 full time as an intelligence officer and became successively the director of its countersubversion, counter espionage and counterterrorism branches. In 1992, she became the first woman chief of MI5; more significantly for Rimington, she was also the first director general whose identity was announced publicly, effectively blowing her 25-year cover.

"The press, particularly the tabloids, went mad," she says. "I knew beforehand and wondered whether it was the right thing to do at the time because I knew it was going to have a dramatic effect on me, particularly on my family. We had been protected by anonymity until then; the neighbors didn't know what I did and didn't care frankly. The press very easily found out where we lived and all of a sudden there they were, camped outside the house. We had to sell the house and move eventually, and effectively live covertly. That was a pretty upsetting start to my time as director general."

Rimington held that post until 1996, opening opportunities for women in actual intelligence gathering as opposed to the traditional administrative and clerical roles as characterized by Miss Moneypenny in the Ian Fleming novels. Speaking of Bond, James Bond, Rimington was the model for the first female M, played in the movies by Judi Dench. In reality, MI5 counters domestic threats, similar to our FBI without the police powers; Bond and M would have worked with the more swaggering MI6 foreign service, the equivalent of our CIA.

Rimington followed her distinguished 30-year intelligence career with a tell-some memoir, Open Secrets, that raised plenty of eyebrows at Thames House. Her first novel, At Risk, launches a planned series featuring MI5 intelligence officer Liz Carlyle, a thoroughly modern version of Dame Rimington in her salad days.

In At Risk, Carlyle heads up the search for an "invisible," the agency's worst nightmare, a British native whose ability to cross borders without detection is being used to stage an attack by an Afghan terrorist. Bruno Mackay, a swashbuckling MI6 operative, has just returned from Islamabad to help hunt down the terrorist. Charles Wetherby, Liz's taciturn boss, keeps a watchful eye over his talented young fledgling.

The terrorist has his own reasons for the target he has chosen; the author skillfully parses out this backstory to slowly tighten the tension as Liz works against time to figure out who is likely to end up on the receiving end of a backpack filled with C4 explosives. The invisible, too, has her own reasons for converting to Islam and becoming a Child of Heaven; the question is, can ideology alone overcome her upbringing?

We are immediately drawn to Liz, a focused, serious young career woman intent on using her analytical gifts to both further her career and fend off the testosterone-fueled cowboys like Mackay who would lead her astray in true Bond fashion. Deftly plotted, realistic in dialogue and detail, At Risk is a first-rate thriller with plenty to say about the strengths and weaknesses of the men and women on the front lines of the war on terror. It's also the first spy thriller in recent memory in which nobody goes to bed with anybody except the terrorists. Rimington builds a lovely verisimilitude between the two women antagonists, both struggling to fit into very different male-dominated worlds.

"They are two women who are in a sense fighting against themselves really; one has decided to break with her background and gone over to the other side, and the other one, Liz, is part of the established world but she's constantly asking herself if that's what she wants to do. So I think we've got that divine discontent that women often have that comes with trying to do two things at once and be perfect at everything. Working women, and particularly working mothers, find themselves trying to balance and always being dissatisfied that they haven't done it properly."

The days of Moneypenny are well over at MI5, which currently has a female director general. Rimington says queen and crown are better for it.

"I think women go about these sorts of things in a different way. That is why I think it is so important that women are involved in intelligence work. It adds a diversity to the whole. I don't think women are better at intelligence work than men, but they're different, and when you put the two together, you get a good mix."

But Rimington has no immediate plans to put the genders together in quite the James Bond sense.

"I think one of the difficulties with thrillers is, if you get too involved with the sex side of it, then it tends to take away from the excitement of the plot. We'll have to see; that's something I'm thinking about." 

Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

Andrew Vachss believes there are two versions of the truth in America: what people believe, and what really happened. If you are comfortable with the mainstream version of post-World War II American history, which would have us believe that such tragic events as the murder of Emmett Till and the assassination of John F. Kennedy were the isolated acts of madmen, you may not feel the need for further enlightenment. But if, like Vachss, you’ve experienced a growing suspicion that you have been, and continue to be, spoon-fed a version of the truth fashioned by powerful unseen forces, you’ve probably wondered: is it just me, or is something not quite right here? If you know Vachss (his name rhymes with fax) from his gritty mystery series featuring the enigmatic Zen avenger Burke (Flood, Shella, Down Here, etc.), you know he’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. As a former federal investigator, social services caseworker, director of a maximum-security prison for young offenders and labor organizer, the 62-year-old lawyer has dedicated his life to protecting the powerless, particularly minorities, migrant workers and young people, from the powerful, particularly sexual predators and brain-dead bureaucracies.

In his new novel Two Trains Running, Vachss takes a break from Burke to re-imagine a two-week period in the pivitol year 1959, when, in his estimation, America headed down the wrong track. This isn’t the textbook version of what went down; instead, it’s filled with the kind of speculative alternatives that your uncles may have pondered over beverages on the back porch. It took years to write and a lifetime to wonder about: I’m not saying I have all the answers, Vachss admits by phone from his home in Manhattan, but through my life experiences, I have a lot of questions. The setting: Locke City, a fictional Midwestern mill town under the thumb of longtime boss Royal Beaumont and his gang of mountain men. The times are a-changin’ most disagreeably for old Roy: his hegemony is threatened on all sides by rival Irish and Italian mobs, youth gangs and neo-Nazis preparing for the coming race war. To defend his fiefdom, Beaumont summons Walker Dett, a chillingly efficient killer for hire whose presence in town threatens to ignite a bloodbath of epic proportions.

The historical setting was no accident. I think 1959 was the fulcrum on which everything turned. It was the first time that an election (Kennedy over Nixon) was actually hand delivered. People who were liberals and Democrats kind of wink-wink at that because their guy won, but that’s not the way to do it. It was just as we were leaving the glory days of Eisenhower, just as we were approaching Vietnam and the civil rights explosions, just as England was divesting itself of its empire. I knew this was the fulcrum. The aptly titled Two Trains Running enables Vachss to explore the many dichotomies in America, particularly families (clans, interest groups, security agencies, etc.) that continue to undermine our personal freedoms. Any similarity to the present is strictly intentional. You have a clannishness where obedience to the clan is the highest value, Vachss says. There are people now where, literally, if you question something, you’re told that’s treasonous or that’s disloyal which is antithetical to Americanism, which is all about questioning authority and holding authority accountable. Certain historical mysteries still vex Vachss. Did the FBI foment racial unrest for its own purposes in the 1950s and ’60s? Did the government intentionally spare Al Capone in order to avoid further mythologizing him? Was John Dillinger’s death faked? Did the two men who murdered Emmett Till act alone? If you look around in the headlines over the last year, look at how many cases from that era are all of a sudden being reopened: Emmett Till; Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman; there was a civil rights murder in Tallahassee, Florida, that’s been reopened; there’s one outside of Atlanta. What I really want to do with the book so badly is to have people take another look a harder look rather than just accept what they’ve been told. Vachss found an ingenious technique to embed his suspicions right into the narrative by breaking the book into bite-size chapters, each with a date and military time code. Gradually, the reader comes to wonder who is keeping these detailed logs and why.

The standard third-person narrator wouldn’t work because that narrator is omniscient; that narrator just knows too much. I needed a technique where the reader could actually be the surveyor of what was going on and by listening and watching, learn as opposed to tuning in to someone’s thoughts, he says.

As its title implies, Two Trains Running operates on two separate tracks: I wrote a real fast mover so you can pick this up and read it like a movie and it flies by real quick, lots of action, lots of intrigue. But there’s an undercurrent that it’s my goal to get you to look at. If I succeeded, it’s a book that people will read more than once. The setting may be pre-Starbucks and cell phones, but the commentary is aimed at the state of the nation today. Despite his righteous anger, could Vachss actually be an optimist? You know what? I actually am. But it’s the long-term optimism of someone who says three, four generations from now we might be OK. It’s not like I’m optimistic for the immediate future. Clearly, unless something is done, the Supreme Court is going to shift. Clearly, if that’s done, personal freedoms are going to erode while religious peculiarities are going to be exalted. That’s a frightening thought. We’re like this old horse that knows the way home but it’s not in a hurry. We’re going to get there but boy, it’s not a straight line. Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.

Alan Furst admits he's "not entirely clear" on how he came to be the pre-eminent American writer of World War II spy novels. Beginning with Night Soldiers in 1988, the former journalist has written nine critically acclaimed espionage novels, including his latest, The Foreign Correspondent.

As the grandson of Jewish immigrants growing up in Manhattan, the only spy novels Furst read were by Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming, escapist fare with little grounding in reality. Then, on a 1983 travel story assignment for Esquire, he visited the Soviet Union, his ancestral home, for the first time.

" It was an enormous epiphany for me," Furst says by phone from his apartment in Paris. "I was back where I'd come from and there wasn't any question about that." Furst was frustrated that the Russians dictated when and where he could travel, all with the goal of converting his American dollars into rubles. "I had no desire to go to Moscow; the Russians made you go. If you wanted to go to the Danube, they wouldn't let you go there. My whole life turned on them being such jerks about it.

The intrigue of finding himself in a police state lingered long after that trip; it lingers today, in fact.

" It really hit me like a wind and it wasn't subtle at all," he says. "During World War II, everyone, in Europe at least, thought this might be it, that this was about as much life as they were going to have, and that changes things, especially romantic relationships. And it's right now, immediate, like maybe I'm not going to be here Thursday.

It is Furst's foremost intention, and his greatest gift, to so snugly settle us into the shoes of his characters that we get night sweats waiting for the knock of leather-gloved hands on the door.

In his compact, atmospheric new novel The Foreign Correspondent, Furst embeds us into the web of intrigue that surrounds Carlo Weisz, who, like thousands of Italian journalists, lawyers and intellectuals, fled Mussolini's Italy in 1938 and established a beachfront of the Italian resistance in Paris. When Mussolini's secret police murder the editor of the resistance's underground newspaper Liberazione, Weisz is chosen to replace him. But his covert duties become increasingly hazardous when his day job with Reuters takes him to Berlin during the Nazi ramp-up for war. There, he rekindles a love affair with an old flame whose anti-Nazi friends have volatile information that could burn both the monstrous Mussolini and the Italy Weisz hopes to preserve.

There is a lovely, chilling scene early on when Weisz meets with the unctuous Dr. Martz, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, over coffee and babka. A jovial glad-hander who once portrayed European buffoons in Hollywood movies, Martz assures Weisz that all the Nazis want from the media is "fair play," especially regarding recent assaults by those unreasonable Poles on innocent, peace-loving Germans.

"[Martz] says, 'Look, we're just asking that our story be told honorably. We have that right, don't we?'" Furst explains. "S—, man, it's the Nazis! But Weisz has to sit for a moment and think, how can I deny this guy what he's asking me? It's very hard to do that because you're raised to believe that it's honorable to give people a chance to speak and present their case and try to be fair."

"When I write these books, the question is always being asked: What would you do [in that situation]?" Furst admits. "Think about all the pressure—pressure from people you know and respect and who like you—and now you have to perform. You don't have to do it; you could say oh, this is too dangerous, I don't want to get involved. But I don't think Weisz was able to say that."

As with Furst's previous spy novels, The Foreign Correspondent examines a slice of European history between 1922 and 1945 from the perspective of a particular vocation that had an impact on WWII.

"I write about vocations, and always have. It frustrates me sometimes in novels where you have a character and you don't find out anything about going to work because, for all of us, a lot of the day is how we're going to make money to pay for this human life," Furst says.

Surprisingly, though, "I've never, ever written about a professional spy as hero," Furst says. " I don't know that I could do it realistically enough. [John] Le Carré, who is experienced, was able to do it brilliantly."

In contrast to his epic earlier works, The Foreign Correspondent is a sprint; short, fast and executed with the elegance of a pro writing at his peak.

"I started life trying to write huge, panoramic, fat books for people to take on long, long airplane rides. Now I want to write more concentrated stuff with narrower walls," he says. "I became extremely interested in what has been called the European existential novel, which is always short, always about one person, and about one sequence of events concentrated over a period of a few months. I like all that kind of thing, all those timeframes and all the ways that books work in that way."

Furst says living in Europe for more than two decades has been seminal to his spycraft.

"It more than contributes; it's central. We have this apartment on a little narrow street where d'Artagnan supposedly lived at one time, and at night everybody closes their shutters. I was just turning the lights off and some man or woman walked up the street and what I heard were footsteps on cobblestones. You never would hear that in America. It wasn't so much that it was filled with intrigue but there was something about it that was so 60 or 70 years ago as it echoed up off the sides of the buildings. That goes on every day and every night here for me in different ways."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.