A Gathering of Spies by John Altman

In 1943, America thought it had rounded up all the German spies on its soil. Now Germany's greatest weapon - a woman with special talents, both for tradecraft and for death - is headed home with critical information about the still-developing atomic bomb, and the Allies chief hope for stopping her is a British agent with agendas of his own. Originally recruited into MI5 to pose as a double agent, he's been telling Germans that he'd do anything to free his wife, a prisoner of a Polish concentration camp. This happens to be true. The question is: how much would he really do to set her free? Where are his loyalties exactly? As the two spies play cat-and-mouse across three countries, the ambiguities deepen, each figure showing new sides, each action providing new twists, until at last both agents are swept into a series of climaxes as breathtakingly unpredictable as they are inevitable. Editorial Reviews Amazon.com 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly This atmospheric debut thriller smells deliciously of Hitchcock and 1940s British spy films. Beautiful Catherine Danielson Carter is really Katarina Heinrich, a Nazi spy who has gone deep undercover, found work as a housekeeper in Princeton, N.J., and married her employer. As the wife of aging nuclear scientist Richard Carter, Katarina is able to get work at a federal shipbuilding plant. Her instincts are aroused when her husband is invited to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M. Taking advantage of her situation, Katarina finds a letter from Albert Einstein that details the plans for the A-bomb. Galvanized into action, she murders her way to several new identities in her quest to get her information to London, where her former lover and fellow agent, Fritz Meissner, is stationed. Fritz has ostensibly been recruited by the British as a double agent working for Operation Double Cross, feeding misinformation to the Germans. The Americans discover Katarina's true identity and trail her to England, where they warn Andrew Taylor, head of MI5. He, in turn, recruits brilliant Prof. Harry Winterbotham to expose Fritz and aid in the search for Katarina. Winterbotham agrees to help, while hatching a secret plan to rescue his Jewish wife, who is trapped in Poland. In painting a perfect WWII British setting complete with quirky characters reeking of mutton and pipe tobacco, Altman belies his U.S. origins. But throw in Admiral Canaris's plot to assassinate Hitler, a double- or triple-cross in every chapter, covert Nazi submarines, a lighthouse and a plethora of bodies, and you get an irresistible page-turner from a welcome new voice in the genre. 75,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; foreign rights sold in Italy and the Netherlands. (July) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist Set in 1943, Altman's espionage tale mixes the atom bomb, Operation Double Cross, and the anti-Hitler conspiracy, which is rather too many subjects. Consequently, the story defaults to simplistic pursuit and hand-to-hand-combat mode. The protagonist, virtuoso killer Katarina Heinrich, is a Nazi agent whose husband works at Los Alamos. After snooping around, she finds Einstein's famous letter to FDR recommending construction of extremely powerful bombs of a new type. To warn her beloved Vaterland, she must get to England and contact a fellow agent, whom the British have turned as part of Double Cross. Walking into the trap, our antiheroine turns the tables with virtuosic martial arts and knife skills. Leaving a bloody mess behind and creating a few more en route to the coast to catch a U-boat, she runs right into the subplot. Henry Winterbotham, a Double Cross dangle who poses as a disgruntled intelligence officer, is also waiting for the boat. After some more mayhem, he, not she, gets to Germany, where he is fed a message for Churchill from military intelligence chief Wilhelm Canaris: Will the British agree to an armistice in the event of an anti-Nazi coup? Altman is said to be writing a sequel, doubtless devoted to the denouement of Canaris' inquiry and the further adventures of femme fatale Katarina. Advertising will generate attention, but predictable Katarina and her operations lack the intricacies that impress spy-thriller buffs. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Kirkus Reviews A debut suspenser chock-full of the requisite genre elements?plus a lot more gore than even those specs call for.Katerina Heinrich is a Nazi agent. To leave it at that, however, is to understate considerably. SheÂ's not only a spy, but she may be the best spy whoÂ's ever lived. She's cunning, trained to kill in umpteen thousand different ways, has the beauty of sirens, and is motivated to the point of zealotry. We meet her first in New York in 1933, where the far-seeing Nazis have planted her. By page three she's committed murder, her victim a blameless young woman whose identity she appropriates. It's this act that eventually?plotting gets a bit shaky here?leads her to Los Alamos in time to cotton onto atomic bomb secrets, which she's determined to deliver to the Fatherland. In the meantime, in England, Professor Harry Winterbotham, an elderly, scholarly literature teacher, is following his own unlikely path into the espionage business. He's been recruited by MI-5 to help perpetrate the famous ?Operation Double Cross,Â' the intricate feint that bamboozled the Germans into guessing wrong about D-Day. Though Winterbotham is no ideologue, he's no less motivated than Katerina. He adores his wife Ruth. The Nazis are holding her in Dachau, and Winterbotham has his own, very private plan to gain her freedom no matter what the cost. Predictably, then, two paths are made to converge in order to stage a climactic confrontation. And so there they are?the old professor and the young Mata Hari?with their hands on each other's throats while the fate of nations hangs in the balance.Beatings, shootings, knifings, stranglings, some of it graphically detailed, most of it competently handled?but all of it oh-so-familiar.First printing of 75,000; $100,000 ad/promo -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From AudioFile It's unusual for a reader with a proper English accent to convincingly speak pure American. Page does it flawlessly in this exciting tale of WWII espionage, making the Germans and even a cockney seem real. Katarina Hendrick, a German spy and talented killer who has been in deep cover in the U.S. for ten years, discovers U.S. atomic secrets and sets on a bloody mission to convey them to the Nazi masters. A British professor turned double agent attempts to stop her--AND rescue his wife from a concentration camp. As the unique plot twists and turns, it's clear the two are on a collision course. As a rule, this listener is not fond of British readers--they tend to make the action seem slower--but Page is a clear exception. His dynamic narration is crisp, and he moves the action along relentlessly. A.L.H. ® AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.