Five top books about weird spies

Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and nominated for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award. He is the author of the Craft Sequence of books about undead gods and skeletal law wizards—Full Fathom Five, Three Parts Dead,  Two Serpents Rise, and Last First Snow—and one of the authors of the new series The Witch Who Came in From the Cold at Serial Box. One of five books about weird spies that Gladstone tagged at Tor.com:

Declare by Tim Powers

The less known about a Tim Powers novel going in, the better, so may I suggest stopping now and reading this book if you haven’t already? Declare is a tale of twentieth century weirdness that follows a world of secret knowledge struggling to reinvent itself in the face of deeper and more secret knowledge. Catching hosts of strange-but-true details of history in the net of its plot, Declare melds the plausibly deniable symbolism and grandiose, grotesque schemes of magic and espionage.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue