9 Books You Have to Read If You Fell in Love with Prime Video’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Hihi.

So you watched the Prime Video adaptation of Mr. & Mrs. Smith and are dying to know how that cliffhanger goes, right?

But like John (Donald Glover) and Jane (Maya Erskine) waiting for their next mission, you’re caught waiting.

What do you do?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to check out some espionage thrillers and spy romances that hit the same beats as the series. Thankfully, we’ve done some recon for you and have a list of new and older titles (John le Carré and James Bond represented here) featuring expat couples with marriage secrets, spy-on-spy tête-à-têtes, fake dating and human lie detectors, and of course plenty of European locales in which to start firefights. And don’t worry, this list won’t self-destruct.

I kept this list (mostly) contemporary to match the tone of the series, but if you’re looking to lose yourself in some more historical spycraft, might I recommend India Holton’s The Secret Service of Tea and Treason, Megan Campisi’s The Widow Spy, and Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made?

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

Stretching my own rules at the start because this lifetime-spanning novel is a banger, with the kind of varied spy career the Smiths can only hope to emulate if they make it to a second season. Following an assassination attempt at her home, middle-aged mom and former FBI agent Marie Mitchell entrusts her twin sons to her mother in Martinique before seeking out who from her past tried to kill her. The novel is framed as a letter to her boys, part confession and part family history, as she details her Cold War undercover work for the CIA during in Burkina Faso.

Tasked with cozying up to leftist president Thomas Sankara, while also investigating her spy sister Helene’s mysterious death, Marie finds herself falling for Sankara while also strangely drawn to Daniel Slater, Helene’s colleague and e\x-

lover. Just like with John and Jane (and all the Johns and Janes before them), American Spy reveals how much the family suffers from serving one’s country, yet how these people and connections might never exist without that first mission.

The Spy and I by Tiana Smith

Impostor syndrome is embedded into the learning curve of becoming a Smith, and who would know that better than an author who happens to share the same surname? Tiana Smith’s adult debut puts a fun spin on the mistaken identity premise, as cyber security analyst Dove Barkley is mistaken for her twin sister Madison, who it turns out is a spy on the run.

Thankfully her smoldering partner Mendez comes to the rescue to brief Dove even as they’re fleeing from assassins—not unlike the Smiths finding themselves as both cat and mouse depending on the mission. But while Dove’s attraction to

Mendez outweighs her cautious nature, the true partnership at the heart of this book is between the sisters, with a history in the foster system cementing their need to always cover each other’s backs. And if you like that, Smith has a fake-dating spy romance, Mr. Nice Spy, out later this year.

The Night Manager by John le Carré

In lieu of their honeymoon, John and Jane go on several lavish vacations paid for on the company dime, so it felt only appropriate that the John le Carré novel we’d choose would be all about the comings and goings of important people through exotic locales. It also helps that it has proven itself as excellent source material, adapted into a 2016 miniseries starring Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman, and Hugh Laurie.

British soldier-turned-hotel manager Jonathan Pine finds himself thrust back into covert work when he gets recruited to pass messages regarding—and eventually infiltrate the confidence of—arms dealer Richard Roper. It makes you wish that if we get a second season of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, we could get a similar background character watching the action from behind a desk (with a gun and/or panic button at the ready, of course).

The Expats by Chris Pavone

Is The Expats what John and Jane’s life might look like if they deescalated to lower-risk missions like he wants?

Life abroad in Luxembourg certainly sounds stultifying for Kate Moore, who left her fifteen-year-job at the State Department (winkwink) for her husband Dexter’s career move overseas and who now spends her days in bland playdates and tourist-esque wanderings. Until, that is, another expat couple makes them their new besties—especially the overeager Julia. Soon, Kate is tapping back into her old expertise as a CIA assassin, and discovering that Dexter may be hiding as much from her as she has been from him.

A Spy Like Me by Kim Sherwood

Such a powerful component of Mr. & Mrs. Smith is how the Smiths quietly grieve the former lives they were expected to completely disappear from… and the strain when Jane is able to cut ties more cleanly than John. That same tension animates Kim Sherwood’s new 007 series, which introduces a new generation of MI6 agents who nonetheless have personal ties to James Bond—including his former lover Johanna Hardwood, now known as 003.

In the sequel to Double or Nothing, Johanna is grieving the loss of a loved one while reeling from the unexpected news that James is alive. Caught between the two loves of her life, and knowing that she’s already raised doubts about her loyalties, Johanna must go rogue while her fellow Double Os Joseph Dryden (004) and Conrad Harthrop-Vane (000) investigate a terrorist bombing in the heart of London.

Alias Emma by Ava Glass

Emma Makepeace is a slightly more ridiculous alias than Jane Smith, but by that I mean good ridiculous—it sets up how this newly-minted MI6 agent is destined to stand out, even if she leaves more destruction than peace in her wake. Ava Glass’ spy series (which includes the sequel The Traitor) has the same hyper-modern take as Mr. & Mrs. Smith, with the CCTV cameras following Emma’s every move as she protects the son of Russian dissidents not unlike Hihi knowing everything that John and Jane have (or haven’t) done. When you’re already occupying a persona, how do you disguise yourself further in order to avoid the dreaded algorithm?

Red Widow by Alma Katsu

Alma Katsu’s CIA thriller Red Widow brings to mind the double-date heart-to-hearts between the two Janes (Parker Posey forever), both commiserating about married spy life yet constantly sizing one another up. It helps that Katsu is an intelligence veteran, drawing on her thirty-five-year career to weave the tangled web that binds disgraced agent Lyndsey Duncan to the eponymous “Red Widow,” a.k.a. Theresa Warner. T

heresa’s role within the Russian Division is overshadowed by her CIA director husband’s unsolved death, and Lyndsey has a history of crossing lines in the field. But she’s also known as the human lie detector—and we know how much fun Mr. & Mrs. Smith had with truth serum.

Rules of Engagement by Stacey Abrams a.k.a. Selena Montgomery

John and Jane make it out of wedding cake bombings and airdropped machete fights by the skin of their teeth, but more often than not these high-risk ops leave collateral damage. Dr. Raleigh Foster knows that firsthand, after a mission for the International Security Agency saw one of her colleagues, Phillip Turman, killed in action. The third member of their team, Adam Grayson, blames both himself and Raleigh for Phillip’s death… which doesn’t exactly endear them to one another when they’re forced to go undercover as a couple with supposedly sizzling attraction.

Like the Smiths, it’s a bit of a “fake it til you make it” scenario in which proximity sparks an already intense desire, especially as Adam and Raleigh discover that there might be a mole within the ISA itself. The fact that this romantic suspense thriller is written by voting rights activist Stacey Abrams makes it even more irresistible.

It Had to Be You by Eliza Jane Brazier

The closest kindred spirits to the Smiths—we’re talking Donald Glover/Maya Erskine and Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie—are Eva and Jonathan, contract killers assigned to off one another. Only problem is, they hooked up six months prior on the Florence-to-Paris sleeper train, and they haven’t been able to stop thinking about each other.

But a job’s a job, especially one where there’s no three-strikes “mission fail” rule. Yet as these perfectly matched lovers embark on a Eurotrip and grow closer, they become increasingly aware that they have their own Hihi to contend with, and that they may meet the fate of all the other Smiths… unless they can bring out the best in each other.

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Natalie Zutter is a Brooklyn-based playwright and pop culture critic whose work has appeared on Tor.com, NPR Books, Den of Geek, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @nataliezutter