The Dead Don't Bleed
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Washington D.C., 1945. Victory in the war looms, but a new fear transfixes the wartime capital. Fear of communist spies and the atomic secrets they covet. When the corpse of a Navy Intelligence officer is found on a cobblestone back alley, Lt. Voigt is called in to investigate. It’s his first murder, but in the plot that he quickly begins unraveling, it won’t be his last. Pursuing crosses and double-crosses, Voigt goes undercover and the fragments he discovers (a defecting German physicist, a top secret lab in New Mexico, and Uranium-235) suggest something far larger than the usual spy v. spy shenanigans. Soon enough he’s in a race to identify the killer, to keep the bomb away from the Russians—and to keep ahead of his own secrets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
History professor Krugler (1919, the Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back) makes his triumphant fiction debut with a whodunit set in 1945 Washington, D.C. Lt. Ellis Voigt, an investigator for the Office of Naval Intelligence's Sabotage, Espionage, and Counterterrorism section, investigates the murder of a colleague, Logan Skerrill, who was found shot to death in a back alley. Before his death, Skerrill was looking into the background of some new employees of the Soviet Union's trading company in the U.S., but his work was (atypically for him) subpar. He gave the new hires a clean bill of health despite evidence that they were Russian spies. Might Skerrill may have been a blackmail victim? When Voigt finds that the dead man frequented a news-clipping service suspected of Communist affiliations, he's sent there, undercover, to try to land a job. After being hired, Voigt looks for the business's weak link and pursues the truth with no scruples about whom he will hurt along the way. The fairly clued solution will surprise most readers, though it will make perfect sense in retrospect.
