Timely thrillers are nothing new for Brad Thor. But in the scintillating Spymaster (Atria, $27.99, 322 pages) he ups the ante considerably with a tale that’s scarily prescient. Series hero former Navy SEAL Scot Harvath finds himself on a different kind of battlefield when a wave of diplomatic assassinations strikes the globe. The carefully orchestrated plot, of course, has far more fiendish ends than murder in mind. And it’s left to Harvath and company to thwart a World War I conflagration of events leading, this time, to nuclear war. Long a master of action and pacing, Thor continues channeling the likes of John le Carre in crafting a thinking man’s thriller packed with as much brains as brawn, making Spymaster a must-read for summer.