A beautiful Nazi spy and an enigmatic British double agent match wits in this gripping World War II thriller

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.

This atmospheric debut thriller smells deliciously of Hitchcock and 1940s British spy films... An irresistible page-turner.

— Publishers Weekly

I’m an author of spy novels, and I love my job.

Writing spy novels is both fun and challenging; I get to write about chases and gunfights; sometimes I even get to say things that I think matter. About international relations. About the lessons of history. About people … and the secrets they keep.

As I write this in my study, my family is elsewhere in the house, winding down from the day and getting ready for bed. Homework is being finished, baths run, teeth brushed. Outside, on my quiet suburban block in Princeton, New Jersey, families are executing variations on this theme. We live two blocks from the elementary school, and just about a mile from the university campus. Our neighbors are ordinary people living ordinary lives – teachers and software developers, doctors and musicians, scientists and accountants.

But I happen to know that one of my neighbors, a physicist, has been approached by the defense complex to apply his expertise to satellite surveillance. Another, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, specializes in cutting-edge missile interception technology. It’s entirely possible that still others work for foreign powers – Princeton is a ripe target for academic espionage – but if so, they’ve managed to keep that secret safe from me.

This intersection of domestic and exotic, of ordinary and extraordinary, of public and private, fascinates me. It’s been the subject of all my books, whether they take place during World War II or the Cold War or the so-called War on Terror, in America or Russia or Korea or the Middle East.

Join me, and let’s explore together this place where light meets dark. Read the books; sign up for the newsletter; follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Often, we’ll find, this place involves deception … between countries, colleagues, neighbors, spouses, lovers.

Even between different parts of ourselves. Because we all tell ourselves stories to explain why we do what we do.

But sometimes, we lie.