A cynical British agent with a working-class background is sent to secure the release of a kidnapped scientist. The trail leads through a shabby London of bureaucracy and betrayal to a conspiracy inside his own service. He narrates the case with dry humour and growing distrust.
A British weather station on an Arctic ice floe sends a distress call after a fire. A US nuclear submarine is sent to rescue the survivors, but the narrator, a doctor with unclear orders, finds that the station was also a listening post and that someone aboard is lying.
A burnt-out British agent is sent to East Germany for one last operation: discredit a rival intelligence chief. In a world where loyalty is a currency and every contact may be selling you out, the mission turns into a trap with no safe exit.
Parker, a career thief, is shot and left for dead after a heist by his own crew. He walks back into New York with no money and one goal: recover his share from the men who betrayed him, even if that means taking on the organized crime outfit protecting them.
After a mission fails, George Smiley is quietly brought back to find a Soviet mole inside British intelligence. Working from old files and a few wary colleagues, he sifts the careers of his former friends to discover which of them is the traitor.
Dominika Egorova, a Russian intelligence officer trained to seduce targets, is ordered to work against a CIA agent, Nathaniel Nash. As their operations and their feelings become entangled, both sides begin to suspect that someone is betraying the other.
A group of disgraced MI5 agents is exiled to a neglected office under Jackson Lamb, a brilliant and repellent spymaster. When a routine training exercise collides with a real kidnapping, the misfits get a chance to prove they still matter.
A woman walks into Sam Spade's San Francisco office with a story about a missing sister, and the case becomes a hunt for a jewel-encrusted black bird. Spade's partner is killed, and he must decide whom to trust among liars, thieves and double-crossers.
In late-Victorian London, a shopkeeper who is also a paid spy for a foreign power is ordered to carry out a bombing. The people around him, including his wife and her vulnerable brother, are pulled into the consequences of a plot he cannot control.
Insurance salesman Walter Huff is drawn to Phyllis, the alluring wife of a client, and agrees to help her kill her husband and make it look like an accident. Their scheme is carefully plotted, but the company's claims investigator begins to notice details that do not add up.
Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by a dying general to deal with a blackmailer, and the case leads him through a family of drifters and gamblers to a missing man and a tangle of secrets. He keeps working even when the general tells him to stop.
A drifter called Frank takes a job at a roadside diner and begins an affair with the owner's unhappy wife. Their plan to be together, a murder made to look like an accident, sets off a chain of events that neither of them can control.
A man is pulled from the Mediterranean with bullet wounds and no memory. Clues point to a life as a professional assassin, and both the CIA and a killer called Carlos are hunting him. To survive, he must reconstruct who he was before he is caught.
Stan Carlisle works the carnival, watching the geek at the bottom of the show and vowing never to fall that low. Clever and ambitious, he moves from a mind-reading act to spiritualist con, fleecing the rich, until his own past catches up with him.
Seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown runs a small gang on the Brighton seafront and commits a murder to hold his position. A cheerful, persistent woman who barely knew the victim decides to find out what really happened, closing in on a boy who believes he is beyond ordinary justice.
A prisoner named Takeshi Kovacs is downloaded into a new body and sent to Earth to solve the death of a wealthy man. His search through the powerful Bay City elite uncovers a wider conspiracy about who is allowed to live forever.
On a train, a charming stranger proposes an idea to architect Guy Haines: each man could murder the person ruining the other's life, since no one would suspect them. Guy dismisses it as a joke, until the other man acts on the plan and pulls him into a nightmare of guilt that neither can escape.
A British wireless operator and a pilot become close friends before a mission goes wrong over occupied France. Captured by the Gestapo, the operator is forced to write down what she knows, and her account of the two women slowly reveals more than it first seems.
A federal agent returns to the drought-stricken town he left twenty years ago, for the funeral of a childhood friend believed to have killed his family. Old questions about the death that drove him away surface again while he helps the local police look into a new one.
In 1947, pregnant and unmarried Charlie follows a lead about her missing cousin to a ruined woman in London. Their search draws on the story of Eve, a spy who ran a network in occupied France during the First World War, and the betrayals that broke it.
Deputy sheriff Lou Ford seems like an ordinary small-town man, but his mild manner hides a violence he has carried since childhood. When old secrets and a woman from his past resurface, his two selves begin to pull him toward more killing.
Tom Ripley, a poor young man in New York, is sent to Italy by a rich shipbuilder to bring home his son Dickie. Instead Tom is drawn into Dickie's comfortable world and, when it is threatened, does whatever it takes to keep it.
A disgraced financial journalist is hired by an old industrialist to solve the decades-old disappearance of his niece. His researcher is Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant, guarded hacker with her own scores to settle.
Slippery Jim diGriz is the galaxy's smoothest con man and thief, a well-mannered crook who talks his way through bank vaults and police cordons. Caught at last, he is offered a choice: work for the secret service he spent years outwitting, or face prison. His first assignment sends him after another criminal just as clever as himself, across worlds and space stations where every plan needs a quick rethink.
Start with “The Ipcress File”, “Ice Station Zebra”, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”: they are the closest to “Casino Royale” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Casino Royale” these are Spy Thriller, Femme Fatale, Betrayal), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Red Sparrow”, “Slow Horses”, “Altered Carbon”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
