Books Like Assassin's Creed

The original historical conspiracy thriller — a Franciscan friar investigates a series of murders at a medieval Italian abbey and uncovers a secret that the Church would kill to keep hidden. Eco writes with the same love of historical detail that AC brings to its settings, and the sense of forbidden knowledge at the center of an institution that controls information is pure AC DNA.

The official novelization of Assassin's Creed II follows Ezio Auditore da Firenze — the most beloved AC protagonist — through Renaissance Italy. Bowden's novelizations are the most direct translation of AC energy into prose form. If you want the actual AC story in book form, start here with the Ezio trilogy novelizations.

Follett's masterwork follows the building of a cathedral in 12th century England across generations, with political intrigue, secret histories, and the sense of individual lives caught in the machinery of history. The historical immersion, the sense of architecture and craft as resistance against power, and the secret-keeping at the heart of multiple characters' lives give it strong AC energy.

Post-Civil War Barcelona and a mystery that reaches back decades — Zafon builds his city with the same loving attention to historical detail that AC brings to its settings, and the secret history uncovered through a series of increasingly dangerous investigations has the same quality of a hidden story running beneath the visible surface of history.

Kay sets his novel in a thinly veiled medieval Spain — Al-Rassan is Moorish Iberia, and the three central characters represent the three religious cultures in collision. The sense of a historical world at a turning point, a mercenary warrior navigating between loyalties, and the political complexity of a society held together by mutual suspicion is pure AC energy in literary fantasy form.

The Nevernight Chronicle is the most direct fantasy equivalent of AC's assassin training sequences — Mia trains at the Red Church, a school for killers, and the curriculum is as deadly as the enemies. Kristoff's world has the same quality of an ordinary person learning to move through dangerous spaces invisibly, and the dark mythology of the Maw gives the assassin order the same secret history energy as the Brotherhood.

Tan's fantasy set in a Chinese mythological world has AC's quality of a protagonist moving through a richly detailed historical-adjacent setting on a mission that reveals the true nature of the world's power structures. The celestial politics and the sense of a hidden war behind the visible world give it AC's essential conspiratorial energy.

The thriller that AC was clearly influenced by — a symbologist drawn into a conspiracy involving the Catholic Church, the Priory of Sion, and the true nature of the Holy Grail. Brown's historical locations are used with the same loving attention as AC's historical settings, and the sense of decoding hidden messages in plain sight is pure AC gameplay translated into prose thriller format. Not fantasy, but essential for AC fans.