He tagged his top ten mystery books for Publishers Weekly. One title on the list:A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric AmblerRead about the other books on Cook's list.
“It is not who fired the shot but who paid for the bullet.” It is a line that has since become famous, but it is only one of the many literary beauties of the book. Dimitrios, in life and death, is a figure of surpassing fascination, his life a tale of struggle and fierce intrigue that I have never forgotten. The secondary characters are wonderfully drawn. From the moment Charles Latimer meets Colonel Haki and hears of the mysterious Dimitrios, the reader is returned to the lost Balkan world that flourished between the two world wars, a boiling cauldron of expediency and deceit that Ambler renders in exquisite detail.
A Coffin for Dimitrios is among Charles Cumming's top five works on espionage and Otto Penzler's best thrillers.
Learn about Thomas H. Cook's five top books on the writing life.
--Marshal Zeringue