A Gathering of Spies - Softcover

Altman, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0515131105 ISBN 13: 9780515131109

Publisher: Berkley, 2001

Synopsis

In 1943, a British agent with divided loyalties is sent to stop a female spy who is headed back to Nazi Germany with stolen atomic secrets, as the fate of the world and the outcome of the war hang in the balance. A first novel. Reprint.

About this title

Review:

In his debut novel, A Gathering of Spies, John Altman delivers an old-fashioned page-turner, energetically told. Katarina Heinrich is a beautiful Nazi spy living in deep cover as the wife of a Princeton professor. When her husband is hired to help develop the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Catherine, as she is known, uncovers the secret and resolves to carry it to Germany at all costs.

A Gathering of Spies fuses the plots of Katarina and a British double agent, Winterbotham, whose wife is incarcerated in a Polish prison camp. Winterbotham believes he will do anything to obtain her freedom. Does that include trading the Allies' greatest secrets? In an exciting role reversal, Katarina is the superhuman agent capable of storming a British stronghold and retrieving a high-ranking German prisoner. Winterbotham, by contrast, is cerebral and unknown even to himself. His secret plots are revealed subtly.

If there is a flaw in A Gathering of Spies, it is that Altman's plots get too intertwined. You might find yourself having to reread passages to get the buried implications. But Altman never commits the cardinal sin of obscuring important clues only to illuminate them in the last pages for the aha! conclusion. A Gathering of Spies represents titans like Einstein, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Hitler with casual confidence--there to remind us that the stakes of this mystery are nothing less than the fate of the world. --Kathi Inman Berens

About the Author:

John Altman is a graduate of Harvard, where he designed his own major, Development and Construction of the Novel. Although the major required him to write three novels, they were all destroyed in a fire at his parents' home. He lives in New York City, and is at work on a sequel to A Gathering of Spies.

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0515131105
• ISBN 13: 9780515131109
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 336