There are three titles I’m recommending in December, and two more from earlier in the year that are my top Christmas gift picks.
I recently just finished Rogue Asset by Andrews & Wilson, introducing me to a series that had otherwise passed me by. But as it turns out, W.E.B. Griffin’s Presidential Agent series has a lot to offer and I should have picked it up much sooner. Better late than never, right? And now is the perfect time to jump in because Jack Stewart delivers the next installment in Direct Action. I’ve recently really been enjoying the work of Jack Stewart, so I’m keen to see where he takes a series with so much potential. I’m grateful for my advance copy, which I will be digging into this week. Lookout for my review coming soon.
Dead Ringer by Chris Hauty is a title that is really intriguing me. Like many people, I’ve been fascinated by the unknowns of the Kennedy assassination, and so a fresh take, albeit fictional, looks like good fun. Chris Hauty is the author of Deep State, which was highly praised: “Deep State rings eerily true [and] will keep you turning pages well into the night” – Jack Carr.
Last up of the December releases I’m recommending is Spasm by Robin Cook. The whole setup of this one hits the mark for me. Small town, unusual deaths, possible bio weapon.
For my Christmas gift picks, there are two books that absolutely stand out in 2025.
First up is M.P. Woodward’s Red Tide which, from its earliest pages establishes itself not just as a thriller, but as a prescient and masterful work of geopolitical fiction. In what is undoubtedly Woodward’s finest novel to date, he cements his place in the genre by tackling the most pressing naval issue of our time with an uncompromising sense of realism. The book’s publication by the U.S. Naval Institute, the same publisher that brought Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October to the world, feels like a deliberate statement, and one that is entirely justified. Woodward has crafted a story that resonates with Clancy’s early classics. If Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising defined Atlantic Cold War carrier air power, Woodward’s Red Tide is its twenty-first-century Pacific heir. Grittier, faster, and terrifyingly plausible, it ushers in the era of the “fifth platform”.
Next up is Cry Havoc, from Jack Carr. This book separates itself from standard military fiction. It’s a meticulously researched Vietnam War period piece that refuses to feel like one. There are no dry info-dumps. You learn about the geopolitics of the 1968 Tet Offensive through the bloodshot eyes of men on the ground who are watching their world burn. From the opening ambush in the triple-canopy jungles of Laos, Carr establishes a suffocating atmosphere. He doesn’t just describe the setting; he assaults your senses with it. You feel the oppressive humidity clinging to your skin like a second shirt. You smell the cordite, the burning aviation fuel, and the rot of the jungle floor. As a total newcomer to the Jack Carr universe, I entered this book with a blank slate. I hadn’t read the James Reece saga. I didn’t know the history. I simply wanted a good story. What I found was a visceral, mud-and-blood immersion into a shadow war that felt less like reading a book and more like surviving a deployment. Yet at the heart of the story there was also a deeply human story, the brotherhood between U.S. special forces and the Montagnard.
December recommendations
W.E.B. Griffin Direct Action – Jack Stewart
Available on: December 16, 2025
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
When the original Presidential Agent is gunned down during a mass shooting, Pick McCoy swears a brutal revenge in this revival of W. E. B. Griffin’s New York Times bestselling series.
Charley Castillo, the original Presidential Agent is in Virginia Beach to visit his son when two gunmen appear. Charley is able to thwart a deadly mass shooting, but he is hit and badly injured.
Meanwhile Pick McCoy is at the Naval Academy catching up with some old friends. When the news of the attack reaches him, he senses that this is no random event. While Charley clings to life, Pick searches for the men responsible and in the process uncovers a deadly plot that threatens to strike deep at the heart of American democracy.
Dead Ringer – Chris Hauty
Available on: December 2, 2025
Publisher: Atria / Emily Bestler Books
Nationally bestselling author Chris Hauty, one of the high-octane writers “to take the thriller world by storm” (The Real Book Spy), returns with a riveting stand-alone novel that explores what might have really happened at the JFK assassination.
Set in present-day, a disgraced former Secret Service office and a Jesuit professor join forces to delve into the mysteries surrounding the events of November 22, 1963. Fixated on deciphering the conspiracies behind the history-changing assassination, they are oblivious to the fact that the cabal is still active—and may face an end as bloody as the carnage in Dealey Plaza. Will they be able to uncover the truth in time? Or will they become two more footnotes in history?
Spasm – Robin Cook
Available on: December 4, 2025
Publisher: Macmillan
From Robin Cook, the ‘master of the medical thriller’ (The New York Times), fan favourites Jack and Laurie return in another fast-paced story about a deadly bioweapon that could disrupt the world order as they know it.
When Laurie Montgomery steps down from her position as chief medical examiner at the OCME, she and Jack decide to embark on a weekend getaway. And the timing couldn’t be better when they receive a call from Jack’s old peer about a strange death and their potential association with an alarming upswing in Alzheimer’s cases in Essex Falls.
Agreeing to help, Laurie and Jack head upstate to find that Essex Falls is far from the rural idyll of their imagination. The residents appear earnestly intent on returning America to the 1950s. They are told of the deaths of two local troublemakers, who prior to their deaths had both begun to complain of muscle spasms, nausea and off-the-charts anxiety.
As Jack and Laurie investigate, they uncover a terrifying possibility: a dangerous bioweapon. In the wrong hands, it could threaten the lives of the entire town . . . and potentially all of America.
Top Christmas Gift Picks from 2025
Red Tide – M.P. Woodward
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
America’s Navy is stretched to the breaking point. China’s combat fleet grows. And both countries compete for access to advanced semiconductor chips produced only in Taiwan. Can Will Cole succeed in the impossible in time?
Rear Adm. Will Cole, outgoing operations officer (N3) of the Pacific Fleet, knows this is a recipe for disaster. But after decades at sea, he is ready to pass the torch to the next generation of “fighting Coles”: his eldest, Henry, a Navy lieutenant who flies F-18s; his middle son Jaime, a merchant marine officer; and his daughter Lu back home. When the new Cold War turns hot, however, Cole must abandon his plans. Proven right when the missiles start flying, Cole’s reward is an order to do the impossible: destroy the Chinese fleet and retake Taiwan—before it’s too late.
Review from The Campus Files: A Modern Masterpiece: M.P. Woodward’s Red Tide Rises to the Occasion
Cry Havoc – Jack Carr
Publisher: Atria / Emily Bestler Books
#1 New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr brings the worlds of special operations and CIA paramilitary units into direct collision in the jungles of Vietnam with his explosive new thriller introducing young Navy SEAL Tom Reece, a man torn between the blurred lines and allegiances of the military and the increasingly murky world of intelligence. This is how it all began…
1968. A time of division. A time of civil unrest. A time of war.
Just before the Tet Offensive, before President Johnson announces he will not run for reelection, before the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, as riots and protests rage across the nation, a spy ship is captured by communist forces off the coast of North Korea.
The crew thought they had destroyed everything of intelligence value. They were wrong.
As a KGB “illegal” elicits information from a high-ranking NSA official, and teams of special operators infiltrating into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam disappear without a trace, an ambitious Soviet advisor launches an ingenious plan that could forever alter the world balance of power.
Tom Reece, a SEAL operator attached to the highly classified and shadowy MACV-SOG is about to be thrust into a bloody battle to discover the truth.
From the Kremlin to the White House, from the streets of Saigon to the rugged A Shau Valley, along the paths of Ho Chi Minh Trail and into the secret war in Laos, Navy SEAL Tom Reece has an official mission assigned by Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group, but it’s his unofficial mission that might get him killed.
Review from The Campus Files: Mud, Blood, and MACV-SOG in 1968: Jack Carr’s Masterclass in Historical Fiction
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