The day Mike Padillo walk into Mac’s Place in West Germany, everything changes. A customer is assassinated in the bar and owner Mac McCorkle discovers that Padillo, whom he has taken on as a business partner, is a spy for the U.S. Government.

From a rather complex past. Mac has managed to establish himself in a simple, uncomplicated present. He likes his life — from the cheerful ringing of the cash register to the equally cheerful response of women to his charm and affluence. Now overnight, thanks to Padillo, he is thrust into a world more likely to end with a bang than a whimper.

For what appears to be a routine assignment turns out to be a deadly game of espionage — a game in which the dealing is always double and the cards are often slipped from the bottom of the deck.

Writing with polish and wit, Ross Thomas weaves his story with ingenuity and steadily mounting suspense to a chilling climax. His men are cool and intelligent, his women delightful, his plot full of unexpected twists. The Cold War Swap is a brilliant debut into the genre of espionage novels.

Lucifer Dye, born in Montana and educated in (among other places) Shanghai’s most distinguished bordello, is in San Francisco being debriefed following his dismissal from Section Two, a secret American intelligence agency. Dye and Section Two are parting company because of the sudden and unexpected death of an important Red Chinese double agent that resulted in Dye’s spending three months in a Singapore prison.

Unemployed, but with a passport, a certified severance check, and his wits, Dye is approached by a man named Victor Orcutt. Orcutt is in the business of cleaning up corrupt cities through the application of “Orcutt’s First Law,” which is “To get better, it must get much worse.” Victor Orcutt’s proposal is that he will pay Dye $50,000 to corrupt an entire American city. Dye accepts the proposal, and so begins Ross Thomas’s most exciting, violent, and suspenseful novel yet, a masterwork from “a master of escape and adventure” (Pasadena Star-News).

In London, the legendary freedom fighter Gustavo Berrio-Brito, also known as “Felix,” is kidnapped. A romantic figure in the Che tradition, Felix is particularly close to the current Libyan dictator, Mourabet, who ascended to power after the untimely death of Qaddafi.

In Los Angeles, a high-level Libyan delegation is on an unofficial junket touring American defense plants, hosted by the President’s brother and mentor, Bingo McKay. When word reaches Mourabet that Felix has been kidnapped, he immediately concludes that the CIA is responsible and instructs his delegation to kidnap Bingo.

In Washington, the President receives grim evidence that his brother has been abducted — the Libyans send him Bingo’s ear, wrapped in a Gucci box, along with a polite proposal that an exchange of prisoners take place.

Felix has actually been kidnapped by Leland Timble, a Robert Vesco-type character who has been convicted in absentia for a daring bank scam. Timble wants to use Felix as a weapon to buy his reentry into the United States.

Enter Chubb Dunjee, the Mordida Man — ex-congressman, ex-UN representative, expatriate and bribery (“mordida” in Spanish) expert. Through an intermediary, the President engages Dunjee to find his brother, and what follows is an intricately plotted, immensely entertaining novel — Ross Thomas’ most stunning work to date.

In the mode of The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, Ross Thomas’s best-selling novel to date, The Porkchoppers takes an inside look at corruption — this time in an American labor union. The result is Thomas’s toughest and most entertaining book.

Donald Cubbin is president of a 990,000-member American labor union, and he faces a tough, dirty campaign for reelection against Sammy Hanks, the union’s secretary-treasurer. When both Cubbin and opponent pull out the stops to defeat each other, the action — including election-stealing and assassination-comes fast and nasty, with unexpected results, all served up in the incomparable Ross Thomas style.

Starting in Los Angeles and moving to Washington and Singapore, this new Thomas thriller involves the reader in a fascinating story of intrigue as an ex-Hollywood stunt man searches for another man he thought he had killed two years before.

What is “the Singapore Wink?” We won’t tell you here, but it involves blackmail, murder, a most unusual FBI agent, and the sexy daughter of a crime czar — to name but a few of the ingredients in Ross Thomas’s wildest adventure yet.

Few seem to notice or even care when fifty-seven-year-old Steadfast Haynes, a veteran CIA hired hand, dies quietly — even discreetly — in a $185-a-day Hay-Adams Hotel room commanding a fine view of the White House.

But official indifference turns quickly into panic when it’s discovered that Haynes’ estranged son, a Los Angeles homicide detective turned actor, has been offered $100,000 for all rights to his father’s memoirs — sight unseen-by an anonymous bidder.

Realizing that someone wants to bury the memoirs as deeply as possible, the thirty-two-year-old Granville Haynes seeks guidance from McCorkle and Padillo, the owners of Mac’s Place, a Washington bar and grill that some regard as an undesignated landmark and others as a notorious nest of intrigue.

Accompanied at times by McCorkle and Padillo, and frequently by McCorkle’s stunning young daughter Erika, the enigmatic Granville Haynes moves out of the twilight of Mac’s Place and into a dark Washington labyrinth of deceit, treachery, and murder.

Wudu, Ltd. is not exactly a private investigation agency, and the overhead's too high for con men. It's "a closely held limited liability company that does for others what they cannot do for themselves." says Arthur Case Wu — ex-carny, pretender to the Chinese Emperor’s throne, and chief executive officer of Wudu, Ltd. In other words, they solve big problems for big bucks.

When German entrepreneur Enno Glimm, who insists upon pronouncing the company name as “Voodoo," arrives in London to strike a deal with Quincy Durant, the arrangement comes just in time to move Wudu's accounts into the black.

Glimm's problem: two kinky British hypnotists have vanished, leaving his client, actress-director lone Gamble, in the lurch. Only the hypnotists can prove that the star did not gun down her loathsome billionaire ex-fiancé in his $13-milllon Malibu “beach shack."

For Durant and Wu, it means enlisting the help of some old cronies, like the dubious Otherguy Overby, terrorism expert Dr. Booth Stallings, and the overtly sensual Georgia Blue. Together, they must weave a bit of their black magic in the world of excess bounded by Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Malibu. But the stakes double when a whole lot of illicit cash starts flashing in the California sun. And with some of the most dangerous people in the world gathered in such close proximity, Wudu, Ltd. may just start needing some protection... from one of its own.

Former political campaign manager Harvey Longmire is enjoying a pleasant semi-retirement with his wife on an 80-acre farm in Virginia when he is visited by two old friends. They are working for a millionaire who has set up a foundation to investigate conspiracies and want to hire Longmire to look into the disappearance of a famous union leader. When Longmire accepts the job, he and the reader are off on the damndest adventure of conspiracy and murder ever, told as only Ross Thomas can tell it, with nonstop action and terrific suspense.