Novelist Christopher Bollen has been writing twisty thrillers with emotional depth for over a decade. His latest, The Lost Americans, takes readers to Cairo for a deftly-plotted murder mystery set in the high-stakes world of arms traders and Egypt's authoritarian government. As with his writing, so with his book choices: we get intrigue and suspense in London during the Blitz, courtesy of Graham Greene’s 1943 espionage thriller, The Ministry of Fear, and a criminal mastermind in Agatha Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit, an early novel that helped establish the reputation of the Queen of Crime.