Topaz by Leon Uris 

An original thriller about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The name of the French President is a thinly veiled characterization of De Gaulle, but he was not the President in charge during the time of the story.  It boasts a medium sized cast of a Soviet defector and his wife and daughter, a French secret-service agent, his wife and daughter and his lover in Cuba, high-ranking Cuban officials and American agents interviewing the defector and using the French secret serviceman to get confirmation of Soviet missiles in Cuba.  The story delves deeply into the pressures on family life in these roles.

The book was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock.

The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin 

Mengele is alive and well in South America and he’s been busy.  There is a plan afoot to create the fourth Reich.  But someone found him and recorded a secret dinner meeting wherein he has assigned 94 names of older men he needs killed in order for his plan to go forward.  These men must be around 65, have a much younger wife, and a teenage son.  The must be killed in a specific order and on or near specific dates.  Just as the recorder has managed to get a famous Nazi hunter, Yakov Liberman, on the phone, but before he can relay the details, Mengele and his men burst into the hotel room and kill the young man.  Yakov can’t get it off his mind and asks a reporter friend to let him know about men fitting the description dying, either in suspicious accidents or outright murder.  The clippings start coming in with far more volume that Liberman expected.  He poses a hypothetical question while giving a lecture at a university.  This leads him to talking to a geneticist.  The conclusion involves a pattern that matches the growth of the most evil man in history.  It seems that Mengele, using some of Hitler’s hair, has created 94 clones and had them delivered to families that were turned down because of the difference in the age of the father and the mother.  When Hitler was a teenager, his father was killed.  Mengele has 94 chances to create a new Hitler from the boys from Brazil.

The Fairy-Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley

In which two orphaned sisters, of the family Grimm, after being shunted from one foster family to another are finally claimed by a woman who says she is their grandmother.  The problem, as far as the older sister is concerned, is that their father told them their grandmother is dead.  The grandmother’s driver is a gaunt old man and her car seems even older.  In the town, which also looks very old, the girls get a lot of odd looks.  The mayor is Mr. Charming, there are other people with names of characters from fairy tales.  In their grandmother’s house, there is a room they can’t go into.  The older sister is waiting for the chance for her and her sister to escape yet another crazy foster home.  But then a giant steps on a farmhouse and the story really gets wild from there.  All the while, the older sister refuses to believe in fairy tales, until the giant steals their care with their grandmother and her driver right in front of them.  The grandmother’s keys come flying out and onto the ground.  They have no choice but to go back to their grandmother’s house and see what is in the forbidden room.  And it’s the magic mirror, hiding all kinds of magical artifacts in a warehouse behind the mirror.  Jack, from the beanstalk tale is the only one in town who knows how to kill a giant, and he’s in jail.  The girls have to rescue their grandmother and figure out who is causing all the trouble.

One Good Deed by David Baldacci 8/10)

A new character for Baldacci, a man Aloysius Archer, a WWII vet who found himself on the wrong side of helping a young lady escape her family.  She said she was 21 but she lied.  As a result, her father had Archer put in prison for kidnapping a minor.  He’s out, on parole, and sent to a city he’s never heard of before.  There, he immediately runs into a man who hires him to collect on a debt or repossess the collateral.  He then meets his parole officer, get a list of what he’s not allowed to do (including going to bars, where he was hired).  It becomes obvious fairly soon in the story that there are two rich and opposed men in the town, one is the man who hired Archer and the other is the man Archer is supposed to collect the debt from.  Archer’s boss is keeping the daughter of the other man.  That man refuses to pay the debt.  For some reason the wife of Archer’s boss knows about the affair and does nothing about it.  Then Archer’s boss is killed.  Then the other man is killed.  There are multiple players with axes to grind in both directions.  The story revolves around Archer’s parole not being violated while he tries to figure out who the real killer is to clear his own name.

The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

The film version of this followed the beginning of the book very closely.  But the book devolves into constant angst on the part of the title character. The story itself follows closely in both mediums.  A man falls overboard, fighting for his life.  He’s picked-up by fishermen, who take him to shore on a small isle, where he is nursed back to health by an alcoholic doctor.  But he is an amnesiac.  He had something embedded under his skin.  He remembers something about a bank.  Once he goes there, he becomes a target.  He abducts a woman as a shield to get away, but then when he leaves her, someone tries to rape and kill her.  He returns and saves her only to faint.  When he awakes, she is taking care of him.  In the meantime, his arch enemy, whom he does not remember, attacks the secret headquarters where Bourne got his instructions to trap or kill, and leaves Bourne’s fingerprints.