Showing results by author "W.E.B. Griffin" in All Categories

Over the years, W.E.B. Griffin's stories of the military and police, told with crackling realism and rich characters, have won him millions of fans and acclaim as "the dean of the American war adventure" ( Publishers Weekly). Now he vaults into the present day with a series as exciting as anything he has ever written.

A brutal crime.... A group of urban terrorists.... An investigation of dirty cops.... The leads in these supposedly unconnected cases have become tangled in some very ugly - and dangerous - knots. Now Special Operations detective Matt Payne and his colleagues find themselves fearing not only for their jobs, but also for their very lives.

A key DEA agent has been kidnapped by drug runners. As much as the news angers Presidential Agent Castillo, he thinks there’s no way he could get permission to rescue the man. But Castillo’s wrong - the President himself orders Castillo to do anything it takes to bring back the agent...anything except get caught.

James Cronley thought he had done well - he didn't know he’d done this well. His first successful mission for the about-to-be-official new Central Intelligence Directorate has drawn all kinds of attention, some welcome, some not. On the plus side, he's now a captain; promoted to Chief, DCI, Europe; and in charge of a top secret spy operation. On the minus side, a lot of people would like to know about that operation, including not only the Soviets, but his own Pentagon, as well as a seething J. Edgar Hoover.

It is April 1943, and Marine aviator Cletus Frade, Army demolition's wizard Anthony Pelosi, and communications expert David Ettinger are thrust again into the lethal nest of intrigue that is wartime Buenos Aires. A clandestine German vessel sets sail to resupply submarines in the South Atlantic...as a massive shipment of money earmarked for postwar Reich makes its way to South America...and a coup designed to topple the government reaches critical mass. In the midst of it all, the German-ordered assassination of Cletus Frade's father demands only one response: revenge.

Mexican drug cartels are shooting up the streets of Laredo and El Paso. Somali pirates are holding three U.S. tankers for ransom. The President of the United States is fed up and, as Commander in Chief, has what he thinks is a pretty bright idea — to get hold of Colonel Charley Castillo and his merry band and get them on the case. Unfortunately, that will be difficult. Everybody knows that the President hates Castillo’s guts, and has just had him forcibly retired from the military, and now Castillo’s men are scattered far and wide, many of them in hiding.

For Philadelphia homicide detective Matt Payne, investigating a young woman’s murder in a Society Hill home invasion uncovers an ugly underworld - that of Mexican drug cartels and the Russian mob. Foreign girls are being smuggled in to work in the sex trade, and now some of them are dying or just disappearing. The trail leads right to Philadelphia - and Payne learns that’s not all. Teenage American girls lured from local foster homes have vanished. And the lone living witness has gone into hiding. He knows it’s got to be connected - but how?

In the first weeks after World War II, a squeaky-clean new second lieutenant named James D. Cronley Jr. is spotted and recruited for a new enterprise that will eventually be transformed into something called the CIA. One war may have ended, but another one has already begun, against an enemy that is bigger, smarter, and more vicious: The Soviet Union. The Soviets have hit the ground running, and Cronley's job is to help frustrate them, harass them, and spy on them any way he can.

Facing a desperate public, a hostile press, and reluctant witnesses, the Philadelphia Police Department must try and stop a new reign of violence - a terrifying spree of kidnapping and assault that has plunged the city into fear.

Philadelphia Homicide Sergeant Matthew Payne is paired with a Texas Ranger to bring down a murderer with Mexican cartel connections. The odd couple of the Philly cop and the Texas lawman must run down the killer and his gang-before the body count rises again.

There's a sudden spike in murders in Philadelphia, but no one seems to mind much because the victims all seem to be lowlifes. The more Homicide Sergeant Matthew Payne investigates, however, the more he gets a bad feeling-one that only gets worse when vigilante groups spring up claiming credit for some of the hits, even though Payne knows it can't be true. As the targets get bigger and events start moving out of control, Payne realizes that if he and his colleagues can't figure out who's behind this very soon, the violence could overtake them all.

The year is 1943, and Argentina is officially neutral, but crawling with every kind of spy, sympathizer, and military official imaginable. The hero is Cletus Frade, a Marine pilot recruited by the OSS, with strong family ties to Argentina. And in Death and Honor - Griffin's fourth book in the Honor Bound series and the first since 1999 - he's got a lot on his hands.

A crackling new novel in the best-selling Honor Bound series by the master of the military thriller.

January 1946: Two WACs leave an officers' club in Munich, and four Soviet NKGB agents kidnap them at knifepoint in the parking lot and shove them in the back of an ambulance. That is the agents' first mistake, and their last. One of the WACs, a blond woman improbably named Claudette Colbert, works for the new Directorate of Central Intelligence, and three of the men end up dead and the fourth wounded.

Assigned to the Nuremberg war trials, special agent James Cronley, Jr., finds himself fighting several wars at once, in the dramatic new Clandestine Operations novel about the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Cold War.

Having investigated his share of gruesome murders, Philadelphia Homicide Sergeant Matt Payne is beginning to think nothing can shock him - until the case of a young socialite's death lands on his desk. The Camilla Rose Morgan he'd known as a teenager was beautiful and brilliant - how was it possible she'd jumped to her death from her own balcony? Her brother tells Payne she'd tragically been battling a lifetime of mental demons, and there is plenty of evidence of it, but still...something just doesn't sit right.

In Philadelphia - suffering among the country's highest murder rates - the tension between the Philadelphia Police Department and its Citizens Oversight Committee has long been reaching a boiling point. That turmoil turns from bad to worse shortly after the committee begins targeting police shootings - especially those of twenty-seven-year-old Homicide Sergeant Matt Payne, the "Wyatt Earp of the Main Line" - and then the committee's combative leader is found shot dead point-blank on the front porch of his run-down Philly row house.

October 1945: The Germans and Japanese have surrendered. For Cletus Frade and his colleagues in the OSS, it should be time to pack up - but they have far more important things to do. Chief among them is the protection of their assets, especially the human ones. In the closing months of the war, the United States made a secret deal with the head of German intelligence’s Soviet section. In exchange for a treasure trove of intelligence - in particular the identity of the Soviet spies in the U.S. atomic bomb program - his people would be spirited to safety in Argentina.

Charlie Castillo's secret unit has been disbanded - but that doesn't mean he's out of business. As experience has painfully shown him, there are many things the intelligence community can't do, won't do, or doesn't do well, and he has the men and assets to help set things straight.

Wars come to an end. But then new ones begin. Just weeks after Hitler's suicide, Cletus Frade and his colleagues in the OSS find themselves up to their necks in battles every bit as fierce as the ones just ended. The first is political-the very survival of the OSS, with every department from Treasury to War to the FBI grabbing for its covert agents and assets. The second is on a much grander scale-the possible next world war, against Joe Stalin and his voracious ambitions.