Before I ever typed “Chapter One,” I was a reader with an overstuffed backpack and a habit of missing subway stops. Those commutes and long-haul flights were my first writing lessons. I learned pacing from page-turners that made me forget to breathe, and I learned patience from the slow burn of stories that took their time and still detonated perfectly on the last page.
People sometimes ask what I read while I was drafting the Ahriman books. The truth is: I read across the spectrum. Not just spy novels, lots of mysteries and thrillers, but also all kinds of literary fiction. Some novels are engineered like precision instruments; others are messy, human, and darkly funny. Together, they taught me how to balance authenticity with heart, how to make the geopolitics matter because the people do.
Here are five spy thrillers I keep recommending, with a note on what each one taught me as a writer and why you might love them too.
If you love the genre, you’ve heard this book described as the “perfect thriller.” The reputation is well earned. Forsyth tracks a nameless assassin hired to kill French President Charles de Gaulle, and he does it with a journalist’s eye for verifiable detail. You feel every forged document, every border check, every calibrated choice.
Why it still hits: The novel’s power comes from its restraint. No overly flowery prose. No melodrama. Just cold planning, credible tradecraft, and a manhunt that tightens millimeter by millimeter.
What it taught me: Write like a truth-teller. When I was outlining the Kuwait thread in my debut, I kept hearing a private mantra: believable first, cinematic second. Forsyth showed me that if the scaffolding is solid, history, politics the tension builds itself.
Reader promise: You’ll keep saying, “There’s no way this would work,” while a quiet voice answers, “Except it might.”
Gabriel Allon is lethal and gentle, wounded and wise, an art restorer who also happens to run black ops. In The New Girl, a kidnapping pulls Allon into a web that stretches from European capitals to the Gulf. The plot is timely without feeling opportunistic, and Silva’s understanding of grief and loyalty gives the action a human pulse.
Why it still hits: Modern geopolitics rarely offers clean choices. Silva lets his characters live in the gray. The result is tense without being hollow.
What it taught me: Silva’s The New Girl (2019) reminded me that competence can coexist with vulnerability. When readers tell me Petra Shirazi feels “real,” it’s often because she can interrogate a source at noon and still call her baba bozorg before bed. Silva reminded me that quiet scenes are where a spy becomes a person.
Reader promise: If you want headline-adjacent intrigue with moral weight and a protagonist you’d follow into any alley, start here.
This is the book that made me miss two metro stops and forgive it. Hayes builds a sprawling, propulsive narrative that jumps from a shabby New York hotel room to a bioterror plot with unimaginable reach. The chapters read like film cuts. The antagonist has a history that makes your chest ache. And still, the pages fly.
Why it still hits: Scale + emotion. The conspiracy is huge; the motivations are intimate. That balance keeps the stakes global and the story personal.
What it taught me: I Am Pilgrim reminded me that thrillers can be massive in scale and still deeply personal. Hayes balanced a global conspiracy with a character’s intimate struggles, and that gave me confidence to let the Ahriman books stretch wider from Kuwait’s political crises to Petra’s own search for belonging without worrying that the scope was “too much.”
Reader promise: You’ll get blockbuster momentum with a beating heart. Clear a weekend.
If you think spy fiction requires sleek suits and flawless heroes, Slough House is here to laugh at you (lovingly, but with cigarette smoke). Herron’s “slow horses” are MI5 washouts sharp enough to be dangerous, damaged enough to be sidelined. Jackson Lamb, their disreputable shepherd, is simultaneously repellent and impossible to stop reading.
Why it still hits: Failure as texture. Bureaucracy as antagonist. Wit as a weapon. Herron finds suspense in office politics and redemption in competence that refuses to die.
What it taught me: Let the genre breathe. Humor doesn’t puncture tension; it sharpens it. I drafted one of Petra’s bleakest scenes on a layover in Paris, then gave her a single dry line on the last page. It didn’t undercut the stakes; it made her feel alive.
Reader promise: Come for the satire, stay for the gut-punch. And yes, the TV adaptation is excellent; the books carry more shadows.
Mitch Rapp needs no introduction. Kill Shot is raw propulsion: a young CIA assassin on a mission that goes sideways, then sideways again. Flynn writes action with the clarity of a field report; you always know who’s moving where and why it matters.
Why it still hits: It’s unapologetic about the costs of counterterrorism. The ethics are argued on the page and in your head.
What it taught me: Sometimes pace is the point. I’m a research nerd (ask me about the view from Bayan Palace or underground speakeasies in Tehran), but there are chapters where the only honest choice is to move. Flynn made me trust momentum when the story demanded it.
Reader promise: If you crave a straight-through adrenaline line with moral sparks flying, this is your nightstand book.
When I was working on the early Ahriman outlines, I kept a messy notebook with two columns: “facts” and “feelings.” On the facts side: briefing notes, regional power shifts, timelines, I checked and rechecked. On the feelings side: the moment an operative hesitates before dialing home; the way an old grievance tastes metallic when it resurfaces, a rookie mistake that haunts a career.
Forsyth trained my “facts” muscle. Silva and Herron fed the “feelings.” Hayes pushed me to expand the canvas and still thread it tight. Flynn reminded me to keep readers moving when the room is on fire.
Those lessons snuck into my writing routine, too. I’ve written chapters speeding along on the Eurostar (the speed helped me push my action scenes forward), drafted scenes between meetings in Washington, and developed entire sequences to incorporate a scent I remembered from childhood. When readers say Petra feels real, it’s often because I’m pulling from the world I’ve actually walked through and from the stories that first grabbed me by the collar.
If you like to read in arcs, try this:
Then, if you’re curious how those influences ripple through my work, step into Petra Shirazi’s world in the Ahriman books beginning with Ahriman: The Spirit of Destruction, where a political crisis in Kuwait collides with the rise of a young assassin and a former intelligence operative who can’t quite leave the game behind.
The spy novels that stay with me never rely on gadgets alone. They’re about people standing in rooms where history pivots, sometimes shouting, sometimes whispering, sometimes choosing the least bad option and living with it. I’ve stood at my own smaller crossroads (usually at 3 a.m., jet-lagged, with a deadline and a cold cup of tea) and thought about the characters I love making their impossible calls.
These five books remind me why I write what I write: because the world is complicated, and stories help us look at it straight on. If you pick up even one of them, I hope you miss your stop in the best way, lost in the chase, anchored by the heart.
Warmly,
Puja
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