Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post was written by former FBI agent turned thriller author F.X. Regan. Read his bio below, then keep scrolling to see his picks for the Top Ten Best FBI Novels.
F.X. Regan was a street police officer in a major metropolitan police department, a SWAT team member, and a retired FBI agent. He directed an FBI field office as a special agent in charge and, after thirty-three years in law enforcement, spent time as a VP and COO of security at two large companies. He is also a licensed private investigator. His flagship CJ Hawk – FBI Thriller series Book 1, DEPARTMENT ECHO, comes out on June 25th, and Book 2 in his Detective Kiki Diaz Thriller series, FAIRFAX STATION, comes out July 9th. ROSSLYN STATION, and AREA 51 PROJECT SERIES VOL 1, Three Detective John “Black Jack” Morrison Novellas are out now. Check out everything he is working on at www.fxregan.com.
Everybody’s heard of the FBI’s Top Ten Fugitive List, but writing my own FBI-centric novels got me thinking about what I consider to be the best fiction books about the FBI that I’ve read. You’ll note from this list that I lean toward the practitioners, the guys and gals who were on the streets and in the trenches before they started writing books. Maybe it’s the authenticity they add to their stories, or maybe it’s just me projecting as a thirty-three-year law enforcement officer turned author—you decide. Then tell me, what are your favorite FBI thrillers?
Witness To The Truth By Paul Lindsay
Full disclosure: I worked on the same squad with Paul Lindsay for several years in one of the FBI’s largest field offices and considered him a friend. I included this book first on my list because there is much realism in the interplay between the multiple FBI characters throughout several storylines. With a word of caution: the tropes and descriptions of some of them are overplayed, and knowing Lindsay, that was probably on purpose.
The protagonist, Mike Devlin, is a tough-guy FBI man who doesn’t suffer fools or management lightly, and we learn early on these are often the same people. Lindsay and Devlin (it’s easy to envision them being one and the same) take us on a series of cases, with the main plot surrounding a serial killer who eventually kidnaps the daughter of a fellow agent. Thus, while the supervisors who occupy mahogany row can’t stand cowboys like Devlin when the feces hits the circular cooling device, that’s exactly when they need a real street agent like him to solve a tough case.
Lindsay got a lot of mileage out of writing this book while he was still an agent (not against the rules) and then having it published and accepting royalties while still on duty (FBI agents are not allowed to have outside income.) He was investigated by the Inspection Division and given time off without pay but retired before the penalty could be enforced. He claimed publicly the Bureau came after him because his book was critical of management, which didn’t hurt his spurned agent image. Paul Lindsay would pen two other Mike Devlin novels and three other novels of the FBI in his real name before writing two additional books under the pen name Noah Boyd.
As I alluded to above, Noah Boyd, the pseudonym for Paul Lindsay, also makes my list. In The Bricklayer, we find a much more subdued, for a time anyway, Steve Vail, who has left the Bureau and traded in his gun for a trowel and is working as, well, a bricklayer. When a shadowy domestic terror group starts killing people and demanding the FBI pay them an ever-increasing ransom, FBI Deputy Assistant Director Kate Bannon reaches back for Vail and his bag of tools to help solve the case.
A smart and out-of-the-box thinker, Vail is an enigmatic character who comes up with tactics and strategies the buttoned-downed Bureau he left could never imagine. Most of the time he is on his own to dodge explosions and challenges with only minimal assistance from Bannon. Considering this book was written in 2010, it could have been a template for a long-running series in a subgenre of action thrillers now dominated by Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Mark Greaney’s The Gray Man, characters that first appeared during approximately the same timeframe as Vail. Unfortunately, Paul Lindsay died too young in 2011, the same year his second Steve Vail novel, Agent X, came out.
Interestingly, fourteen years after it was published, The Bricklayer is now a motion picture featuring Aaron Eckhart, although in a major plot change, Vail is now a former CIA officer who comes back to address a similar challenge, but this time it’s an international conspiracy.
This former FBI agent might be the most talented writer ever to have donned the FBI shield. An English major in college, he wrote professionally before and after he left the FBI in 2001 with fifteen years of service. His writing ability was evident in his first non-fiction book Cold Zero, which chronicled his time on the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) and it drew instant accolades.
Whitcomb takes it to the next level in his first novel, which many commentators think includes the things he was not allowed to say in his biography. In Black, HRT agent Jeremy Waller is sent all over the world to solve a matrix of problems, both technical and physical. I was a big fan of the book because the plots are compelling even as, in the real world, HRT missions are much more tactically focused and are one hundred percent teamwork, and not the lone ranger superhero we see in Waller. Whitcomb followed up this book two years later with White, which was another compelling HRT agent Waller story, and frankly, I was surprised there were not additional books in the series.
Michael Connelly is at the apex of crime writing today, so I must include a novel of his in this top ten list, even if it’s only what I call FBI-adjacent. Connelly, like Patricia Cornwell below, is an honorary law enforcement insider, having worked the police beat at the LA Times for years before turning to crime novels. Best known for his 29 Harry Bosch police procedurals that have turned into multiple Amazon series seasons of the same name, many consider The Poet to be among his best work. Here, the protagonist is, wait for it, police beat reporter Jack McEvoy of the Denver Post, who starts investigating a series of suspicious police suicides involving homicide detectives across the country, including his own twin brother on the Denver PD. Unique to all of them are clues relating to Edgar Alan Poe, hence the FBI code name for the subject —The Poet.
While none of his thirty-nine novels “center” on the FBI, and neither does this one per se, there are several significant characters that come and go throughout his works, including FBI agent Rachal Walling in this one. (As well as several others.) In fact, in several Bosch novels, Harry is married to FBI special agent Eleanor Wish, and they share a daughter, Maddie, who goes on to become an LAPD officer herself in later books. Former FBI agent Terry McCaleb is the central character in Blood Work and plays a minor role in other books.
Central to The Poet, and mentioned several times in this top ten review of books, is the FBI’s Behavior Analysis Unit (BAU), who along with Jack McEvoy work together to identify The Poet.
The Poet is among my all-time favorite crime novels and cements Michael Connelly as the grand master of the police procedural.
The Cipher by Isabella Maldonado
Maldonado is fast becoming one of my favorite crime writers, and along with eighty percent of authors on this list, she writes from an insider’s perspective. A former commander with the Fairfax County, Virginia Police Department, her FBI Agent Nina Guerrera protagonist comes with some inside baseball because Maldonado is an alumnus of the FBI’s National Academy, the graduate-level training program for senior police commanders across the world.
Code-named “The Cipher,” an unsub (“unknown subject” in FBI parlance) is kidnapping and killing young women, and (while trying to avoid spoilers here) an assault on her while she’s jogging seems scripted to coax FBI Agent Guerrera into the investigation. There are also shades of an earlier attack on her years ago during her own tough upbringing. Working with the famed Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) at Quantico, a cat-and-mouse game develops between Guerrera and The Cipher, and for most of the ride, we don’t know who will prevail.
This is Book 1 of three Nina Guerrera thrillers, and Maldonado has also penned three books featuring Phoenix Police Detective Veranda Cruz, a two-book (so far) FBI Agent Daniela Vega series, and she is co-writing yet another series featuring a DHS Agent and a professor/security expert with the prolific thriller writer Jeffrey Deaver. Book 1 is Fatal Intrusion, coming this summer. If that wasn’t enough, the Netflix movie version of The Cipher, starring and directed by Jennifer Lopez, is in production.
The Night Agent by Matthew Quirk
Because I was following him on social media, I read Quirk’s The Night Agent before it came out as a Netflix series and became wildly popular. While not an FBI or law enforcement insider, the Harvard-educated Quirk is whip-smart, and the premise of the novel is not out of bounds. In fact, during my time in the FBI, all the larger field divisions, as well as FBI Headquarters, had a “night agent.” It was their job to triage income calls from the police, other field offices, or executives at headquarters and make sure nothing fell between the cracks. (Though to be sure, many of those calls were from the tin foil hat brigade, especially during full moons.)
The plot in the book stretches the notion a bit with the protagonist waiting for an important phone call on a national security matter that may never come in the White House’s situation room, but when it does, the story takes off like a rocket.
Here’s what I really liked about the book. While an FBI career is exciting over the long haul, it’s filled with time spent doing monotonous tasks like reviewing billing records, writing reports of interviews, or sitting on a surveillance. Our protagonist, Peter Sutherland, is performing one of those menial tasks, manning a telephone as the night agent. He’s an everyday working man’s agent, not a superhero until he is thrust into action by one phone call. Even though he’s an FBI agent, his role in the story is relegated to antihero status with no backing from the Bureau or the establishment.
As I write this, I am deep into Quirk’s latest book, Inside Threat, which is a fast-paced thriller centered on the Secret Service.
The Silence of The Lambs by Thomas Harris
Like many people, I suspect I read this book after hearing about it and then seeing the movie. It is actually the second of four books in Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series, but far and away the most famous. (Red Dragon, Book 1; Hannibal, Book 3; and Hannibal Rising, Book 4.) Many reviewers have written that the screenplay and movie starring Jodie Foster follows the book in an exceptional manner not often seen in the crossover from book pages to the screen. (As an aside, Harris’ first book, Black Sunday, was another well-received screen adaptation of a book and features a large-scale terrorist attack and potential mass casualty event (Super Bowl) that seems a lot more prescient today than it did in 1975.)
The genius of this book is not necessarily any realism about the FBI but the impact it had on the Bureau and recruiting. In fact, in the opening scene where FBI Academy Trainee Clarice Starling is summoned from the firearms range to the Behavioral Science Section Chief’s office (Behavioral Science is a Unit, BSU, not a Section) to be given the important assignment of interviewing Hannibal Lecter is probably the biggest fake FBI scene in cinematic history. I promise you, no FBI Trainee at Quantico was ever summoned from their academy class in the middle of training to do anything operational, including counting bullets in the armory, much less sent to interview a notorious serial killer.
But once we get past that necessary fictional set up to develop Starling’s character, the movie and book put BSU on the map. And not just in future movies and TV shows (Clarice, Criminal Minds, Mindhunter, and The Mentalist to name four, although the latter is a state law enforcement agency unit,) but it had an impact on the real FBI and law enforcement. The movie became the single largest unintended recruiting program in the Bureau’s history. More aspiring agents joined the FBI than ever with the intention of matriculating to BSU, even if the funnel into that specialty was small and unattainable for most.
The book and then the movie followed closely in time on the FBI’s actual efforts to interview every known serial killer, which led to the development of profiles of these individuals. Police departments across the country learned about BSU efforts that were highlighted by the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) and no small part through the movie. Without Harris’ classic 1988 book, there is no 1991 movie, and the ensuing BSU phenomena in the FBI and society.
From Potter’s Field by Patricia Cornwell
Cornwell is a prolific writer of crime fiction with her 28 Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta novels dating back to 1990, and she is often credited with creating the “CSI” (crime scene investigation) movement in novels, TV, and movies. Like Connelly, she’s afforded honorary insider status in the law enforcement world, having started as a (award-winning) crime reporter with the Charlotte Observer and then working in several capacities with the Virginia Medical Examiner’s Office in Richmond. The latter inspired her Scarpetta novels even as she was not a pathologist or involved in autopsies.
Many of Cornwell’s Scarpetta novels are FBI-adjacent, beginning with the second book, Body of Evidence, which began featuring FBI characters. And while I’ve read many but not all in the series, I picked From Potter’s Field as an FBI top ten book because this is where Scarpetta is described as working as an FBI forensic consultant, and other FBI characters start playing a significant role in the stories. The novel finds Scarpetta traveling back and forth between Richmond and New York City to solve a series of heinous murders by a twisted killer and features equal amount of forensic details and action scenes.
I know from personal experience that during this period of her writing career Patricia Cornwell had several close contacts in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) and that she visited the FBI Academy in Quantico where she had unique access. This lent an air of realism to some of the police and FBI characters in many of the books in the series.
Central Park West: A Crime Novel by James Comey
This is almost an honorable mention because the book features very little story or action involving the FBI. But when the first ever fictional novel by a former FBI Director is written, it must be included in my list. The protagonist is Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) Nora Carleton of the Southern District of New York (SDNY). Now, the fact Comey was once the U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, pronounced “Sovereign District of New York” in FBI-speak, and that his daughter in real life is an AUSA there means Comey is projecting just a little, although I have heard him admit in interviews that Nora Carleton is a compilation character of his real daughters.
A third of the book features courtroom drama reminiscent of Scott Turow or John Grisham so if crime fiction versus legal thrillers is your thing, you might be a tad disappointed. Despite the voluminous legal back and forth in the courtroom scenes, Comey manages to keep the pace quick and skips over the normally dull procedure in most real-world criminal trials. Where he excels is in accurately describing investigative techniques and getting the organizational structures of the FBI and the Department of Justice exactly right.
Comey ascribes the characteristics of what would otherwise be a salty old FBI organized crime (OC) squad agent to an SDNY investigator, Benny Dugan. Dugan comes off as street-smart and reminiscent of several OC agents I knew over the years, although at least during my time in the FBI, U.S. Attorney’s Offices did not have gun-toting agents like Dugan.
Comey did a good job of keeping several parallel plotlines going until the end, considering he’s a first-time novelist who spent a career dealing in legal briefs and running the FBI. Central Park West makes this list because of the realism Comey captured in the story. His second book, Westport, will be out later this year. (Hint: Protagonist Nora Carleton is now an attorney for the world’s largest hedge fund, and not shockingly, so was Comey at one time.)
FBI Myths and Misconceptions: A Manual for Armchair Detectives by Jerri Williams
Okay, this is really an honorable mention because it is not a novel at all, but as the title suggests a book that separates fact from fiction about the FBI. Williams is a retired FBI agent, and among her other ventures, she hosts a hugely popular podcast titled FBI Retired Case File Review, where, in more than 300 episodes, she interviews former agents about their most significant investigations. At one time, it hit number one as the most listened-to true crime podcast, and not for nothing, true crime is among the most listened to of all podcasts.
Williams does a terrific job of walking the reader through many of the false tropes about the FBI mostly in TV and the movies, and her book has been used as a reference by several well-known writers and directors. This said I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes push the limits in my own writing because crime fiction has to keep the story moving. My embellishments have more to do with facts like the number of shootouts or explosions an agent experiences in a case (or even during their career) rather than propagating fake investigative techniques or false impressions about law enforcement officers. And, believe it or not, sometimes I have to dial back the truth because there are scenarios that would result in the reader saying to themselves, “yeah, nobody would believe that.”
After this, check out Jerri Williams’ two FBI novels, Pay to Play and Greedy Givers, which seem to closely parallel her own FBI career as a white-collar crime agent in Philadelphia.
Praised as “One of the hardest working, most thoughtful, and fairest reviewers out there” by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Scottoline, Ryan Steck has “quickly established himself as the authority on mysteries and thrillers” (Author A.J. Tata). Steck also works full-time as a freelance editor and is building a growing community on Twitch. His debut thriller, FIELDS OF FIRE, which #1 New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr says “will leave you speechless and begging for more,” is now available. His second novel, LETHAL RANGE, is also in bookstores, and his third book, OUT FOR BLOOD, comes out on June 4th. For more information, be sure to follow him on Twitter and Facebook. To interact with other readers and talk about your favorite books and authors, join The Real Book Spy’s Discord server.
[…] Read more […]
[…] Read more […]