Don’t be surprised if this generation-spanning spy saga ignites widespread nostalgia for the days of the Cold War. It immerses the reader in a world of comparative political clarity, a time when clear-cut secular ideologies clashed on a grand scale. Robert Littell’s characters spend little time, though, discussing political philosophies. They know from the start which side they’re on. The Company of the title is, of course, the Central Intelligence Agency.

The story begins in 1950, just as the CIA is emerging from World War II’s Office of Strategic Services. By this time, the U.S. and Russia are already circling each other for global supremacy, their recent common cause against Germany relegated to history. Into this bubbling geopolitical stew come Jack McAuliffe and Leo Kritzky, Yale roommates recruited by the CIA to join its first generation of shadow warriors. A fellow Yalie, Russian exchange student Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin, returns home for KGB training and reassignment to America as a deep undercover agent.

Joining McAuliffe and Kritzky for a series of missions that will continue until the Soviet Union crumbles is high-principled E. Winston Ebby Ebbitt II, a Columbia University law school graduate. In the years ahead, these three friends will be in the backrooms and on the frontlines at the Hungarian uprising, the Bay of Pigs invasion, various domestic upheavals and the Russian war with Afghanistan. We see them fall in love, marry and have children who eventually follow in their furtive footsteps. Unlike writers who use historical characters and events as backdrops for their fictional ones, Littell integrates them both seamlessly. The real CIA head spook, James Angleton, hovers over Liddell’s trio of fictional agents, alternately inspiring and outraging them with his mania for detail and his raging paranoia. Stung by the revelation that his mentor and good friend Kim Philby is a spy for Russia, Angleton is convinced there’s a high-level mole in the agency.

CIA directors Allen Dulles, William Colby, William Casey and others have speaking roles here, as do Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Reagan. Glimpsed in the background are such familiars as William F. Buckley Jr., E. Howard Hunt, William Sloan Coffin and Frank Sinatra, his Rat Pack and gangster friends. Littell populates his narrative with colorful, inventive spymasters, chief among them Angleton’s Soviet counterpart, the pedophile Starik; the CIA’s hard-drinking and duplicitous Harvey The Sorcerer Torriti; and Israel’s eagle-eyed Ezra Ben Ezra, affectionately dubbed the Rabbi. Readers who lived through or who have studied the Cold War will relish Littell’s touches of verisimilitude his off-handed references to movies, comic strips, songs, personalities and books which were popular during the periods he writes about. In one scene, the Sorcerer praises Littell’s own then-current novel, The Defection of A.J. Lewinter.

Certain references, though, reveal either the author’s carelessness or else his taunting of readers to be attentive to the kind of minute details by which spies live or die. For example, he has President Kennedy recommending Catch-22 several months before it was reviewed in The New York Times. He has a character in February 1951, listening to the song Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, which he identifies as then being number three on the American top ten. Not likely, since the song didn’t even enter the Billboard charts until August 1951, and then rose only to the number 19 spot. His characters use such words and phrases as security blanket, maven and liaising, not, perhaps, before they actually entered the language, but certainly well before they became conversationally commonplace.

In the book’s final chapter, set in 1995, Littell makes it plain that even though the Cold War is over, the great game [of spying] goes on. He describes a man, code-named Ramon, waiting in his car in a Washington, D.C., suburb to pick up $50,000 for American secrets he has stolen for the Russians. That man was real FBI agent Robert Hanssen and it would be five more years before he was caught. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

Edward Wozny is an ambitious young investment banker with two weeks to kill until he’s transferred from New York City to England to fill a coveted position in the bank’s London headquarters. Before he leaves, however, the powerful firm has one last request: he must help one of the company’s most important clients, the Duke and Duchess of Bowmry, organize a personal library of rare books. At first, Edward is annoyed at being shanghaied into performing such a tedious task on his vacation, but once he arrives at the clients’ expensive Manhattan digs, his resentment turns to intrigue. Hidden in the attic of the vine-covered limestone townhouse are unopened crates of ancient books some of which date from before the 16th century. Edward is told that the duchess wants him to covertly look for a legendary medieval codex authored by a minor literary figure, Gervace of Langford. Edward’s quest for the mysterious codex soon turns obsessive, and his impending job in London is almost forgotten as he becomes entangled in the codex’s shadowy purpose as well as the intrigue surrounding the tumultuous relationship between the duke and duchess. While searching for the codex in a rare book repository, Edward meets and enlists the help of Margaret Napier, a Columbia grad student who is a “cross between Stephen Hawking and Nancy Drew.” But is it mere coincidence that her dissertation is on the works of Gervace of Langford? As Edward’s obsession with the codex grows, so does his fixation with a highly addictive interactive computer game. When he finds shocking parallels between the game and secrets associated with the codex, his mundane investment banker existence is turned upside down. Lev Grossman, a book critic for Time magazine, has made the cerebral, stylish Codex one of those rare novels that transcend categorization: it is part mystery, part thriller, part romance and part literary history. No matter where this book is eventually shelved, it should and undoubtedly will be sought out by discerning readers everywhere. Paul Goat Allen is a freelance editor and writer in Syracuse, New York.

Mario Delvecchio is one of the world’s most respected art restorers. His current project is Bellini’s altarpiece in the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice. But when a bomb goes off at the office of Wartime Claims and Inquiries in Vienna, Mario assumes his real name, Gabriel Allon, and his part-time job assassin for Israeli intelligence.

This third volume of Daniel Silva’s trilogy dealing with the unfinished business of the Holocaust takes us from the streets of Vienna to the innermost secrets of the Vatican to Argentina and back. The first book in this cycle, The English Assassin, dealt with Nazi art looting and the collaboration of the Swiss banking system. The second book, The Confessor, examined the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and the silence of Pope Pius XII. This third book is based, like its predecessors, on actual events. Is it possible that even today a Nazi war criminal is living in Vienna? What does he know about Aktion 1005, the attempt to destroy all evidence of the Holocaust? A Death in Vienna gives a chilling view of both the horrors of war and the politics of Austria. What is possible in today’s world when the secrets of the past cannot be contained? The sins of the fathers can control the secrets of power and politics. The search for the truth leads Gabriel to his mother’s wartime experience at the Birkenau concentration camp, and he experiences her life through her own testimony found at Yad Vashm, the world’s foremost center for Holocaust research and documentation in Israel. As he discovers the secrets of his family’s past, other truths unfold. What do the CIA and Russian intelligence have to do with the Vienna bombing? Is there ever justification for protecting a murderer? With Silva, there are often more questions than answers, but there is always a relentless search for the truth. Derrick Norman is voracious reader who spent many years in publishing and enjoys a good game of golf.

Edgar Allan Poe arguably one of America’s most influential writers makes an appearance in Andrew Taylor’s literary thriller An Unpardonable Crime. Although Poe, a precocious 10-year-old living with his foster family in London in 1819, is very much a peripheral figure in Taylor’s grisly tale of treachery and murder, he is the spindle on which the numerous plots and subplots revolve. The story is narrated by Thomas Shield, Edgar Allan’s teacher at the Reverend Bransby’s Manor House School. A disgraced veteran of the battle of Waterloo who was recently hospitalized for mental instability, Shield is a highly intelligent and hopelessly romantic man struggling to find his place in an England of extremes ranging from the lavish mansions of Mayfair to the crumbling tenements of St. Giles and Seven Dials. While at the school, Shield becomes involved with two young students who have befriended each other: Charles Frant, the overly sheltered son of a prominent banker, and Edgar Allan, the foster son of an American businessman managing his interests in London. In a series of gruesome plot twists that would make Poe himself proud an audacious deathbed robbery, a brutal murder, an incarceration in a coffin, the discovery of a rotting human fingertip and a French-speaking parrot squawking enigmatic warnings Shield slowly loses control of his own destiny as he is drawn into a dangerous game of subterfuge and duplicity.

Aside from the rich descriptions (the use of fog as metaphor throughout is brilliant), the most notable aspect of this novel is Taylor’s masterful use of some of Poe’s most renowned themes, including victimization, extreme states of existence, mysterious presences and mourning for the dead. A delectably dark blend of mystery, gothic horror, romance and literary history, An Unpardonable Crime will leave readers captivated until the very end a fittingly macabre tribute to the master of the macabre.

With the third entry of the Women’s Murder Club series, James Patterson and co-author Andrew Gross don’t even wait until the opening chapter to get the ball rolling. There, shining out from the dust jacket, is the warning, “One of James Patterson’s best-loved heroines is about to die.” This tantalizing but gratuitous revelation sets the pace for the book, which reads like a package of rapidly exploding firecrackers. But it’s bombs not firecrackers that are blowing people up in San Francisco as the city prepares to host a G-8 meeting of the world’s top finance ministers.

As in the two earlier books in the series 1st To Die and 2nd Chance the principal characters here are San Francisco Police Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer (who serves both as chief investigator and narrator), reporter Cindy Thomas, assistant district attorney Jill Bernhardt and medical examiner Claire Washburn. Each has a life, but they are most alive when they involve themselves in each other’s problems and triumphs.

Soon after Boxer is almost blown away in a townhouse explosion, it becomes clear that she is up against homegrown terrorists who are intent on slowing the juggernaut of global capitalism. At least that’s what they boast in the notes they leave behind with their victims and in the carefully masked e-mails they send to Thomas at her newspaper. Adding to Boxer’s burdens is her discovery that Bernhardt’s husband is abusing her. Then there’s the sticky matter of her growing attraction to Joe Molinari, who’s been sent in from Washington by the Department of Homeland Security to help out with the case.

Boxer’s sleuthing takes her across the bay to “The People’s Republic of Berkeley,” where she begins to unearth a cell led by radical holdovers from the1960s. While their rhetoric is dated, their weapons are state of the art: C-4 explosives ignited by cell phone, intimidation by internet and in an eerie anticipation of recent headlines the lavish use of the deadly poison ricin. In typical Patterson style, the chapters are so brief and filled with action that they flash by like movie scenes.

In an earlier interview with BookPage, Patterson brushed aside discussions of his prolific output this is his 25th book and his massive sales. “I think one of the most interesting things is the diversity of these books,” he said, “and the fact that on a pure readership level, a pure, spellbinding, can’t-put-it-down level, that they’re pretty successful. Forget about sales. They just move along real well.” This is Patterson’s third co-authorship with Gross, who made his debut with 2nd Chance and then went on to collaborate on the historical thriller, The Jester. Patterson’s reputation extends beyond writing a lot of fast-paced books to overseeing the ways they’re promoted and marketed. So the teasing dust jacket tip-off that a major character is “about to die” has his fingerprints all over it. “I involve myself in a fair amount of [planning],” he told BookPage. “We kind of like to sit in a room and go, ‘Do we like the cover?’ ‘Do we like the book?’ ‘Do we like the [proposed] tour?’ I think that’s a healthy thing to do. It works out very well.” It certainly works out well for 3rd Degree. By now the ladies are like old friends, whose quirks we cherish and whose troubles immediately become our own.