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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
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