Cave Dwellers
A novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In late 1937, a young German lieutenant, Oskar Langweil, is recruited to help overthrow Adolf Hitler. An exiled childhood friend introduces him to Lena, another expat and an avowed Socialist, and they contrive to pose as husband and wife to cross the Atlantic aboard a cruise ship crowded with Nazis. But once at sea they become entangled with the feckless son of a U.S. senator, as well as the mysterious SS officer assigned to watch over him, and after docking in Bremerhaven their luck lurches from bad to worse. Now, along with these unexpected companions, they become prey in a manhunt that drives them through the Third Reich—Oskar cut off from his circle of resistance and constantly re-evaluating whom he can trust.
From the sordid cabarets of Berlin to glittering parties in Washington, D.C., from the slums of Kreuzberg to a remote Alpine lodge, Richard Grant populates a world on the brink of disappearing with a cast that also includes an evil genius of Nazism, a White Russian princess, a stage artist vampire, an aging brigadier, and a disgraced journalist. A tour de force of historical espionage, Cave Dwellers is a suspenseful, darkly comic, and exhilarating novel in which everyone is playing for the highest stakes imaginable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in prewar Germany in 1937 1938, Grant's intricate spy novel focuses on a young German army lieutenant sent to America on a dangerous and doomed intelligence mission. Grant (Another Green World) tells a clever story of suspense and treachery as growing resistance to Hitler and the Nazis force desperate opponents to act. Lt. Oskar Langweil is recruited into the Abwehr, military intelligence, by a rumpled naval officer named Jaap. His first overseas mission is to contact Tobias Lugan, a fixer for a sympathetic and powerful U.S. Senator, but Oskar is betrayed and barely escapes. Desperate to return to Germany, Oskar and a socialist named Lena travel as husband and wife on a German ocean liner. On the voyage they meet the senator's son and the son's SS bodyguard; however, no one is who they seem, and the Gestapo is very interested. All four run for their lives from a brutal SS colonel who wants them dead. Jaap and a motley collection of eccentrics are the only ones who can save them and, they hope, thwart Hitler's plan to invade Czechoslovakia. Pursuits, shoot-outs, surprising plot twists, and an exciting showdown at an alpine mountain lodge complete this remarkably tense and well-crafted thriller.
