Shining Through was excerpted in the Ladies Home Journal for September 1988.

The film rights were acquired by Columbia, and the movie Shining Through was released in 1992. The screenplay was written by David Seltzer, who also directed the film. Melanie Griffith starred as Linda Voss, with Michael Douglas as Edward Leland, the spy-network director. The movie changed many plot elements of the novel. By and large it was not a big success, and its reviews were almost uniformly unfavorable. National Review's critic attacked it with savage humor, ending by wishing for "one touch of realism in the film — . . . a talking dog or a cameo by Barbra Streisand as Frau Goring." Almost alone among the reviewers, Peter Travers in Rolling Stone praised it as "an awful lot of fun," with Griffith and Douglas exchanging witty dialogue in 1930s comedy style as a prelude to seduction.