A Gathering of Spies
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A beautiful Nazi spy and a British double agent match wits in this classic World War II thriller “full of action, suspense, and wheels within wheels” (Stephen Coonts).
Gorgeous, cunning, and lethal, Katarina Heinrich is America’s worst nightmare. For years, the German spy has been deep undercover, posing as the happy wife of a Princeton scientist. Now she is rushing home with key intelligence pertaining to the atomic bomb. If she reaches her destination, the war will be lost.
To stop her, the Allies turn to Professor Harry Winterbotham, an MI5 agent whose brilliance is matched only by his inscrutability. As Winterbotham hatches his own secret plan—one with the potential to deliver the world’s greatest weapon into the hands of the Nazis—the two spies play a deadly game of cat and mouse across the United States and Europe.
From one breathtaking double cross to the next, A Gathering of Spies builds to a stunning climax among the best in espionage fiction. Lightning-paced, atmospheric, and irresistible, it is a classic story of World War II that thrills from first page to last.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This atmospheric debut thriller smells deliciously of Hitchcock and 1940s British spy films. Beautiful Catherine Danielson Carter is really Katarina Heinrich, a Nazi spy who has gone deep undercover, found work as a housekeeper in Princeton, N.J., and married her employer. As the wife of aging nuclear scientist Richard Carter, Katarina is able to get work at a federal shipbuilding plant. Her instincts are aroused when her husband is invited to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M. Taking advantage of her situation, Katarina finds a letter from Albert Einstein that details the plans for the A-bomb. Galvanized into action, she murders her way to several new identities in her quest to get her information to London, where her former lover and fellow agent, Fritz Meissner, is stationed. Fritz has ostensibly been recruited by the British as a double agent working for Operation Double Cross, feeding misinformation to the Germans. The Americans discover Katarina's true identity and trail her to England, where they warn Andrew Taylor, head of MI5. He, in turn, recruits brilliant Prof. Harry Winterbotham to expose Fritz and aid in the search for Katarina. Winterbotham agrees to help, while hatching a secret plan to rescue his Jewish wife, who is trapped in Poland. In painting a perfect WWII British setting complete with quirky characters reeking of mutton and pipe tobacco, Altman belies his U.S. origins. But throw in Admiral Canaris's plot to assassinate Hitler, a double- or triple-cross in every chapter, covert Nazi submarines, a lighthouse and a plethora of bodies, and you get an irresistible page-turner from a welcome new voice in the genre. 75,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; foreign rights sold in Italy and the Netherlands.
