When I first began sketching Petra Shirazi, I wasn’t chasing a trend; I was trying to put a very specific woman on the page. Someone I recognized: quick to read a room, strong but not invulnerable, and complicated enough to carry secrets most people would never guess. Only later did I realize how rarely women like Petra stood at the center of spy and thriller narratives. They existed, of course, but too often at the margins, or framed through someone else’s gaze.
Before Petra stepped onto the page, I kept reading to test a hunch: readers will follow a woman through the shadows just as readily as they will any hero with a tux and a passport. The three books below reinforced that belief, each in a different way. One predates my debut and showed me how ferocity and fragility can live in the same character. Two arrived later; I admired them after Ahriman was already out in the world, and they deepened the conversation I care about: women with agency at the heart of danger.
(Timeline note for fellow book nerds: Jet (2012) predates my debut; Ahriman: The Spirit of Destruction (2014) came next; Her Name Is Knight (2021) and The Paris Apartment (2022) were published later and resonated with me when I read them.)
I still remember the jolt of the opening. Jet doesn’t ease you in; it sprints. The premise is lean and lethal: a former Mossad operative fakes her death to escape her past, only to learn that vanishing is harder than running. Jet is quick-minded, physically formidable, and this is the part that hooked me, uneasily aware of what that life has taken from her.
I’ve always loved operatives who aren’t bulletproof. Jet bleeds. She second-guesses. She loves fiercely and hates that it’s a liability. That balance of competence cut with consequence makes you lean forward rather than sit back. You’re not just watching her outpace a threat; you’re listening for the telltale crack in her voice, the memory that won’t let go, the fear she refuses to name.
Reading Jet affirmed something I felt intuitively while writing Petra: a woman can move like a professional and feel like a person. When readers say they rooted for Petra “even when I disagreed with her,” I think of this book. Vulnerability doesn’t weaken a spy. It raises the stakes.
(Her Name Is Knight, They Come at Knight, It Ends with Knight)
Nena Knight doesn’t arrive quietly. She is a Ghanaian-born assassin working for a powerful organization, and she carries a past shaped by violence, survival, and the difficult work of reclaiming identity. Yasmin Angoe writes with a precision that refuses simplification. Nena is both weapon and woman deadly, yes, but also relentlessly human, loving, and loyal on her own terms.
What struck me most was the way the series treats trauma and power. Nena isn’t flattened into “strong female character” shorthand; she’s allowed complexity. She is capable of extraordinary brutality, and the books never pretend that comes without cost. The action is kinetic, the pacing unflinching, but the heartbeat is interior: How do you carry what happened to you? How do you own it without letting it own you?
I discovered Nena after Ahriman was already in readers’ hands, and her story resonated deeply. On the craft side, I admired the cultural specificity the names, rhythms, languages, and histories that shape Nena’s choices. Representation here isn’t window dressing; it’s the engine. That feels familiar to me. Petra’s ethics and instincts are inseparable from where she’s from and who raised her, from the languages she switches between, from all the places that feel like home and not-home at once. Encountering Nena later reinforced my commitment to keep writing toward the center of that tension.
This one is a different creature: a closed-circle suspense novel rather than an espionage mission. But I wanted to include it because the female perspectives in The Paris Apartment do something thrillers don’t always do: they refract danger through voice, memory, and social power rather than just force. The building itself is a character: elegant, secretive, complicit.
Foley’s women aren’t spies, yet they navigate surveillance of a different kind: the watchful eyes of neighbors, the press of class and gender expectations, the subtle threats that don’t make noise until they do. The tension builds not only from what’s happening but from who’s telling you about it and what they’re choosing to reveal. That is, in its own way, a form of tradecraft.
I read this after Ahriman, and it resonated with the subtler parts of my own work, the places where a glance carries weight, where silence isn’t empty but charged. The skills I love writing in spies reading subtext, weaponizing quiet, noticing what’s missing belong to women everywhere, whether or not they carry a badge. This book is a masterclass in layering suspicion without shouting, in letting the reader become the detective, and in holding a room with nothing more than a look. Plus, across the four female characters (including, but not limited to, the lead!), there is so much range. Aspects for readers to like, dislike, root for, and be sympathetic to. I love that range, and it’s a great reminder about how complex human nature is.
Jet, Nena, and the women in The Paris Apartment share a stubborn through-line: they refuse to be simplified. They claim space in rooms that weren’t built for them, and they do it in ways that are sometimes messy, often risky, and always human. None of them is “strong” because they never break; they are strong because they keep choosing again and again what to do with the breakage.
Writing Petra, I try to honor that lineage without copying it. She’s a Muslim American woman with Iranian/Persian heritage, trained to see angles and hear the click of a trap before it snaps shut. She can be ruthless when she has to be, but she knows what it costs. She loves hard and deep, and pays the consequences. She passes as many doors as she opens. And when her past knocks, she doesn’t pretend not to hear it.
If you’ve followed the Ahriman books, you already know the terrain: Kuwait’s palace intrigue, New York briefings that sound ordinary until they aren’t, families that become pressure points, and the ache of carrying two versions of yourself in one skin. That duality between the visible life and the shadow life is where I like to put the camera. These reads bring me back to that place: the private calculus behind every public choice.
The shelves are still thinner than they should be when you go looking for female-led spy fiction. It’s getting better, but the disparity is real. That’s not a reason to shrink the frame; it’s a reason to widen it. Including The Paris Apartment alongside Jet and Nena Knight is my way of saying: the tools that keep women alive in thrillers, intuition, patience, nerve, and community, aren’t exclusive to espionage. They’re part of our shared playbook.
And yes, the relative scarcity makes more space for voices like mine and for the women coming after me.
Then, if you want to see how those threads wind through my work, step into Petra Shirazi’s world in Ahriman: The Spirit of Destruction and the books that follow, where global stakes collide with the quiet decisions no one sees.
The most compelling thrillers don’t just chase danger; they trace the shape it leaves behind. Jet carries it in her muscles. Nena carries it like a vow. The women in The Paris Apartment breathe around it until the air feels thin. Petra does what she’s always done, chooses, pays, and chooses again.
If you pick up any one of these books, I hope you feel what I felt: the click of recognition, the stubborn hope that comes from watching women name their own roles, and the quiet thrill of realizing there was never just one way to be the hero.
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