Queen & Country -- Operation: Storm Front

You'll be hard-pressed to find an espionage thriller as gritty, as prescient, as real as Queen & Country, Greg Rucka's award-winning comic that follows the successes -- and, more telling, the failures -- of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. This, the fifth collection of the ongoing series, finds Tara Chace and the Minders -- fellow field operatives -- mourning the loss of one of their own while running down the kidnappers of a Russian national. Like the best spy-game authors, Rucka has done his research -- the scenarios feel ripped from the stuff they won't let us see on the evening news. Makes you wonder why novels rarely read this deep.