Fall from Grace

“Collins's first solo novel since 1980's The Fifth Horseman (written with Dominique Lapierre, who teamed with him on the pop history Is Paris Burning?) is his best book yet, a firmly placed World War II melodrama about a tremendous real-life hoax that the British Intelligence worked on the Gestapo and the Abwehr--a hoax intended to divert German troops from resisting the Normandy invasion until the Allies had an unbudgeable foothold. The novel focuses on Catherine Pradier, a British citizen born in France, whose mother died under strafing by a Stuka and whose father is now in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. She begs her godfather, an admiral, to let her really help out, and he turns her over to Major Fredrick Cavendish, head of Special Operations Executive sabotage efforts in Occupied France. Cavendish makes Catherine an unwitting pawn in a vast military deception, Operation Fortitude, a mock invasion force being mounted near the Dover Strait.” —Kirkus Reviews

Larry Collins was born in West Hartford, Connecticut and educated at the Loomis Chaffee Institute in Windsor, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale as a BA in 1951. He worked in the advertising department of Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio, before being conscripted into the United States Army. While serving in the public affairs office of the Allied Headquarters in Paris, from 1953 to 1955, he met Dominique Lapierre with whom he wrote a string of best-sellers over a 43 year collaboration. After a short return to advertising, Collins decided to pivot into a career in journalism that took him around the world. Collins’ solo works include, Maze, Fall from Grace, Black Eagles, The Road to Armageddon, and The Secrets of D-Day.