Share <Embed>

Buy New

$9.40

FREE Shipping on orders over $25—or get FREE Two-Day Shipping with Amazon Prime

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Buy Used

$7.79

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Hawthorne Academic

Fulfilled by Amazon

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Other Sellers on Amazon

Add to Cart

$5.99
+ $4.99 shipping

Sold by: BookCapitol

Add to Cart

$7.10
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: SuperBookDeals---

Add to Cart

$7.10
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: allnewbooks

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 3 images

The Unlikely Spy Mass Market Paperback – May 6, 2003

by Daniel Silva (Author)

1,082 customer reviews

See all 38 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$9.99

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$32.99

$27.49

$1.98

Paperback

"Please retry"

$11.81

$2.84

Audible, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Mass Market Paperback

"Please retry"

$9.40

$5.99

$1.24

MP3 CD, Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$14.99

$9.22

$4.99

Unknown Binding

"Please retry"

—

$16.65

#1 New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva’s celebrated debut novel, The Unlikely Spy, is “A ROLLER-COASTER WORLD WAR II ADVENTURE that conjures up memories of the best of Ken Follett and Frederick Forsyth” (The Orlando Sentinel).

“In wartime,” Winston Churchill wrote, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” For Britain’s counterintelligence operations, this meant finding the unlikeliest agent imaginable—a history professor named Alfred Vicary, handpicked by Churchill himself to expose a highly dangerous, but unknown, traitor. The Nazis, however, have also chosen an unlikely agent. Catherine Blake is the beautiful widow of a war hero, a hospital volunteer—and a Nazi spy under direct orders from Hitler: uncover the Allied plans for D-Day...

Frequently bought together

Total price: $28.18

Buy the selected items together

This item:The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva Mass Market Paperback $9.40
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
The Mark of the Assassin by Daniel Silva Paperback $9.16
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
The Marching Season by Daniel Silva Paperback $9.62
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Daniel Silva

694

Paperback
$9.16
Daniel Silva

477

Paperback
$9.62
Daniel Silva

1,648

Mass Market Paperback
$8.20
Daniel Silva

974

Paperback
$8.99
Daniel Silva

767

Paperback
$9.76
Daniel Silva

1,107

Mass Market Paperback
$8.74

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Daniel Silva

1,648

Mass Market Paperback
$8.20
Daniel Silva

1,107

Mass Market Paperback
$8.74
Daniel Silva

974

Paperback
$8.99
Daniel Silva

3,235

Paperback
$11.47
Daniel Silva

694

Paperback
$9.16
Daniel Silva

477

Paperback
$9.62

Special offers and product promotions

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Evocative…memorable…a classic World War II espionage tale.”—The Washington Post

“Briskly suspenseful.”—The New York Times

“A satisfying and fast-paced World War II espionage thriller.”—San Francisco Examiner

“Bodies pile up, and Silva keeps the suspense keen as he advantage shifts back and forth between the good guys and the Nazis.”—Los Angeles Times

“[Silva] has clearly done his homework, mixing fact and fiction to delicious effect and building tension—with breathtaking double and triple turns of plot—like a seasoned pro.”—People

“Layers of depth and intrigue…Silva succeeds with panache.”—USA Today

“[A] tautly drawn thriller…Plenty of nail-biting scenes.”—The New York Post

About the Author

Daniel Silva is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, and the Gabriel Allon series, including The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, The Confessor, A Death in Vienna, Prince of Fire, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules, The Defector, The Rembrandt Affair, Portrait of a Spy, The Fallen Angel, The English Girl, The Heist, The English Spy, The Black Widow, and House of Spies. His books are published in more than thirty countries and are bestsellers around the world.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Mass Market Paperback: 752 pages
Publisher: Berkley (May 6, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0451209303
ISBN-13: 978-0451209306
Product Dimensions: 4.3 x 1.6 x 7.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 1,082 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #130,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1186 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers & Suspense > Spies & Politics > Conspiracies
- #1509 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical > Thrillers
- #1631 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers & Suspense > Military

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Start reading The Unlikely Spy on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Customer Reviews

Write a customer review

See all 1,082 customer reviews

Rated by customers interested in

What's this?

Thriller Books

4.4 out of 5 stars

Mystery Books

4.4 out of 5 stars

Romance Novels

4.4 out of 5 stars

Is this feature helpful?

Thank you for your feedback.

Read reviews that mention

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Suncoast

Deception, Deception, Deception

July 25, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I have read all of Silva's Gabriel Allon series but this is the first time I have read his debut novel about espionage and deception during the latter stages of WWII. Ken Follett covered a similar theme in "Eye of the Needle" and Jack Higgins in "Night of the Fox". Both of those books were brilliant but on balance, I think that "The Unlikely Spy" is the best.

We all know now that the Allied Forces were able to successfully confuse the D-Day landing location from Hitler. Thousands of deaths were possibly saved because Hitler concentrated his defensive forces around Calais and left the Normandy coast comparatively lightly defended. There are many stories of how British intelligence helped Hitler to choose the wrong invasion point - this is a brilliant fictional story of how this happened.

The main character is Alfred Vicary, a Professor of History who is drafted by an old friend, Winston Churchill to join MI5. Vicary takes to espionage like a duck to water following Churchill's adage that in war "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Vicary has tracked down most German spies, imprisoned them and continues to send deceptive messages back to Germany. But he hasn't tracked down a handful of "sleeper" operatives sent over before the war by Kurt Vogel, one of Admiral Canaris's top spymasters.

One of these operatives is Catherine Blake, a beautiful ruthless psychopathic assassin, and spy, who remains inactive in London until a key part of the war - the preparations for the D-Day landings. Her assignment is to become romantically involved with Peter Jordan, an American engineer working on a top-secret D-Day project and report back on where the landings will take place.

There follows a tale of deception on a grand scale both with the spies and within MI5. Silva writes a masterly plot with fascinating characters on both sides of the action-packed battle. While some of the deceptions fail, the ultimate deception is not known until the very last pages. This is definitely a 5-star espionage story.

This is a wonderful debut novel written in 1996 by an author who has gone on to become a world-renowned best-selling author with his Gavriel Allon series about an Israeli art restorer, spy, and assassin. I look forward to reading the next book in this brilliant series, "The Black Widow", in the next few days.

Comment 43 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes

Want a story where you can fall into another time and place for a while? This does the trick.

May 6, 2016

Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase

My brain was on overload. All for good reasons, such as busyness at work (yay, all billable!), social obligations, and a book club full of serious, thoughtful reading. But I was in bad need of escapist fiction: cotton-candy for the soul. The Unlikely Spy was just the ticket, with a clear historical setting, plenty of derring-do, and relentless intrigue.

One reason that this book works so well is that you and I know the ending. In the real world, the Nazis knew that there was a big construction project underway in England before D-Day, and every bit of Intelligence suggested the Allied landing would be either at Calais or Normandy. But somehow they got the wrong information about what was being built and where it was headed -- which obviously had a huge effect on the outcome of the war. The book's premise is: How did they get their data _almost_ right?

The result is a solidly good page-turner in which we follow several characters: the spies and the spy-finders, the innocents and the warmongers. Each of the many characters is well drawn, with motivations that make sense... enough so that I found myself rooting for the "bad guys" sometimes, as they each had their own dreams to pursue.

It's not so much that this is a James Bond-ian action film on paper -- though it does have some decent shoot-out scenes -- as much as a tension that exists in the reader's head. You read what the British spymaster Vicary is doing to find out where the spy is, followed by what she is doing, and you practically want to shout, "LOOK OVER THERE CAN'T YOU SEE HER?" It's fun, and a different twist than a typical mystery wherein you (or at least I) expend energy in figuring out who the perpetrator is.

This isn't an important book that you're going to remember forever. But it's an engrossing story, perfect for a beach read or a long plane flight. I liked it.

Comment 19 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes

Robert P. Campbell

The Unlikely Spy

August 18, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This is a WW2 spy fiction. The plot involves the Allied deception operation around the D-day invasion and a honey pot spy operation by the Germans to uncover the invasion secrets. It is the author’s first novel. It’s well written and edited. It’s also very well researched and fairly well put together, but I did not rate it high as a spy novel though.

The biggest problem I have is the plot is way too complicated, so much so that it’s confusing and hard to follow and, conversely easy to lose interest in. This is exacerbated by its excessive length. It is 754 pages long which is much too long to tell a relatively simple story like this. The actual operation to feed the enemy misinformation about the invasion plans, including the artificial harbor code named Mulberry which is central in this book, was elaborate, but it was also pretty straightforward and had none of the convoluted elements in this book. This overly complex plan would have surely collapsed under its own weight and most likely had the opposite result. It would have been much better to tell the story closer to how it actually occurred.

There are other problems. While most of the spy action is what you would expect in a good spy novel some of it is grossly unrealistic. One situation was comic book like ridiculous. The honey pot spy needed information about the comings and goings of her naval officer target in order to stage a chance meeting with him. So what does she do? Why, she hires a trio of local prominent organized crime figures to tail him of course. And then upon completing their task the thugs provide her with… of all things… a detailed written report of their findings. How absurd! What was Daniel Silva thinking? Another problem is it contains a lot of graphic sexual content, which in my opinion adds an air of cheapness.

I could have easily rated this book two stars because of these things, but I gave it three stars instead because it is so well written, and despite the flaws, I found it to be somewhat entertaining.

Comment 2 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes

Customer images

See all customer images

Most recent customer reviews

Kindle Customer

Great book! Not what I was expecting but a ...

Great book ! Not what I was expecting but a very good book.

Published 16 hours ago

Olga Doherty

I’d like to read this book in its entirety.

The book The Unlikely Spy is missing page 677 through page 708.

Published 2 days ago

Richard A. Hartman

Good read,

Drug on in the latter part of the book, thought too much time was spent on u necessary details. The summary at the end was necessary to make everything come together

Published 5 days ago

O Captain, My Captain

Previously I have read his Gabriel Allon art restorer/intelligence agent series which I have thoroughly enjoyed. The Unlikely Spy is an earlier historical fiction ...

Daniel Silva knows the art of grabbing the reader's attention from the get-go and keeping you flipping pages.Read more

Published 18 days ago

JulesE

Not the same old Daniel Silva stuff

Surprisingly different, well written

Published 22 days ago

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Loved it along with all of the Daniel Silva novels.

Published 26 days ago

linda sturgeon

Five Stars

Very interesting and a good read

Published 1 month ago

Dave Scott

Good

Good read. I enjoyed very much. Daniel Silva keeps me at the edge of my seat. A fast moving well thought out plot

Published 1 month ago

William Osgood

Five Stars

Good book. Typical Silva, lots of great characters all developed in living color.

Published 1 month ago

Michael Zanakis

Five Stars

Great read

Published 1 month ago

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

This item: The Unlikely Spy

Set up a giveaway