Joseph Finder is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. His novels include
Paranoia,
High Crimes, and the recently released suspense thriller
Vanished.
For the
Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books on political conspiracy. One title on the list:
The Ministry of Fear
by Graham Greene
Viking, 1943
Set in London during the Blitz, "The Ministry of Fear"—the only novel Graham Greene wrote during the war years—opens with a now-familiar Hitchcockian gambit:
An innocent man stumbles upon a secret and is marked for death. Arthur Rowe, a loner who has just been released from an insane asylum, wins a cake at a carnival by guessing its precise weight. Concealed in the cake is a spool of film intended for a Nazi spy. Rowe becomes the target of a shadowy international espionage ring bent on stealing vital British war plans. On this slim armature Greene constructs a richly atmospheric thriller, one of the classics of the genre. His prose is spare and elegant, his pacing masterly. The protagonist, haunted by a terrible crime in his past, loses his memory and comes to feel "directed, controlled, molded, by some agency with a surrealist imagination," pursued through a city where entire buildings can disappear overnight in a bombing raid.
Read about
another novel on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Joseph Finder is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. His novels include Paranoia, High Crimes, and the recently released suspense thriller Vanished.
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