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Summary
Summary
Catherine Blake is the model war widow. Ever since she lost her RAF pilot husband in the Battle of Britain, this beautiful aristocrat has kept a stiff upper lip while caring for victims of the blitz in London's hospitals. The problem is that Catherine Blake is also a deep-cover Nazi spy, charged by Hitler with uncovering the details of D-Day. Her nemesis is Alfred Vicary, a fumbling professor of history barely able to remember where he placed his threadbare tweed jacket, let alone sustain a relationship. But Vicary is also a confidant of Winston Churchill's, who has chosen this reclusive don to run England's critical counterintelligence operations. Against this backdrop comes Daniel Silva'sThe Unlikely Spy, a sophisticated and altogether exceptional World War II thriller. Based on fact, Silva's fast-paced novel moves effortlessly from the Berlin High Command's espionage centers to the U-boat-infested North Sea, from the privileged playgrounds of Long Island to Hyde Park's shadowy paths -- a grand canvas of intrigue that sweeps the reader along in a breathtaking race against time. If Catherine escapes to Germany, the Nazis will know the Allied invasion will be at Normandy; and if Vicary doesn't stop her, all of Britain's greatest wartime deceptions and ploys will have been for naught. But why does it seem as if Vicary's superiors want him to fail? For lovers of Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth, and Len Deighton,The Unlikely Spyis a masterpiece of war and deception, a wholly original and spellbinding tale of the Allies' finest hour.
Author Notes
Daniel Silva was born in Michigan in 1960. While pursuing a master's degree in international relations, he received a temporary job with United Press International to help cover the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Soon after, he left his graduate program to work full-time for United Press International. He worked in San Francisco and Washington, D. C. and as a Middle East correspondent in Cairo and the Persian Gulf.
He was working at CNN when his first novel, The Unlikely Spy, was published. In 1997. He then left CNN to become a full-time author. His novels include The Fallen Angel, The English Girl, The Other Woman, and other titles in the Gabriel Allon series. He won the Barry Award for Best Thriller for The Messenger in 2006. In 2014 he made The New York Times Best Seller List with The Heist and The English Spy made the list in 2015. The Black Widow is his latest bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Will Nazi spies escape from Britain with Allied plans for the imminent invasion of Normandy? As history tells us, obviously notso the challenge for veteran journalist and CNN producer Silva in his first novel is to brew up enough intrigue and tension to make readers forget the obvious. While Silva employs multiple characters and settings, his key players are an English counterintelligence officer and a beautiful Nazi spy. Alfred Vicary is an academic recruited to work for MI5. The intelligence reports he fabricates and sends to Germany are designed to persuade the Nazis that their utterly compromised spy network, the Abwehr, is still fully operational. MI5 learns, however, that the Abwehr has been keeping a few sleeper operatives under deep cover throughout the war. Now they pose a serious threat to the invasion plans. One of these operatives is Catherine Blake, a ruthless assassin and spy. Her assignment is to become romantically involved with Peter Jordan, an American engineer working on a top-secret D-Day project. Will Vicary be able to stop her? Silva's characters are strong; but, despite occasional bursts of high suspense and a body count to remember, his overall pacing is uneven, and most readers won't forget that D-Day succeeded. The final plot twist, moreover, while unpredictable, seems more logical than shocking. Silva's debut will find an audience among devoted readers of WWII thrillers, and deservedly so, but he's not yet on a par with such masters of the genre as Ken Follett, Robert Harris and Jack Higgins. 150,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; BOMC alternate selection; Reader's Digest Condensed Book selection; simultaneous BDD audio; foreign rights to 16 countries; author tour. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
This first novel comes from an unlikely source: a newspaper and TV journalist widely known as executive producer of CNN's Washington programs. Unlikely because this novel is the assured, magisterial work of a seasoned spy and suspense writer. There are no cheap gimmicks here, no deus ex machina, just a totally engrossing account of spying at its worst in a time of war at its worst. Based on prodigious research and filled with tellingly accurate detail, Silva's saga pits a beautiful German Mata Hari against a collegial Mr. Chips. Both are unknowingly caught in an intrigue to hoodwink the German forces. This novel will be heavily advertised in all media, so expectations will be high. Don't buy just one copy.Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
CHAPTER ONE Suffolk, England: November 1938 Beatrice Pymm died because she missed the last bus to Ipswich. Twenty minutes before her death she stood at the dreary bus stop and read the timetable in the dim light of the village's single street lamp. In a few months the lamp would be extinguished to conform with the blackout regulations. Beatrice Pymm would never know of the blackout. For now, the lamp burned just brightly enough for Beatrice to read the faded timetable. To see it better she stood on tiptoe and ran down the numbers with the end of a paint-smudged forefinger. Her late mother always complained bitterly about the paint. She thought it unladylike for one's hand to be forever soiled. She had wanted Beatrice to take up a neater hobby -- music, volunteer work, even writing, though Beatrice's mother didn't hold with writers. "Damn," Beatrice muttered, forefinger still glued to the timetable. Normally she was punctual to a fault. In a life without financial responsibility, without friends, without family, she had erected a rigorous personal schedule. Today, she had strayed from it -- painted too long, started back too late. She removed her hand from the timetable and brought it to her cheek, squeezing her face into a look of worry. Your father's face, her mother had always said with despair -- a broad flat forehead, a large noble nose, a receding chin. At just thirty, hair prematurely shot with gray. She worried about what to do. Her home in Ipswich was at least five miles away, too far to walk. In the early evening there might still be light traffic on the road. Perhaps someone would give her a lift. She let out a long frustrated sigh. Her breath froze, hovered before her face, then drifted away on a cold wind from the marsh. The clouds shattered and a bright moon shone through. Beatrice looked up and saw a halo of ice floating around it. She shivered, feeling the cold for the first time. She picked up her things: a leather rucksack, a canvas, a battered easel. She had spent the day painting along the estuary of the River Orwell. Painting was her only love and the landscape of East Anglia her only subject matter. It did lead to a certain repetitiveness in her work. Her mother liked to see people in art -- street scenes, crowded cafés. Once she even suggested Beatrice spend some time in France to pursue her painting. Beatrice refused. She loved the marshlands and the dikes, the estuaries and the broads, the fen land north of Cambridge, the rolling pastures of Suffolk. She reluctantly set out toward home, pounding along the side of the road at a good pace despite the weight of her things. She wore a mannish cotton shirt, smudged like her fingers, a heavy sweater that made her feel like a toy bear, a reefer coat too long in the sleeves, trousers tucked inside Wellington boots. She moved beyond the sphere of yellow lamplight; the darkness swallowed her. She felt no apprehension about walking through the dark in the countryside. Her mother, fearful of her long trips alone, warned incessantly of rapists. Beatrice always dismissed the threat as unlikely. She shivered with the cold. She thought of home, a large cottage on the edge of Ipswich left to her by her mother. Behind the cottage, at the end of the garden walk, she had built a light-splashed studio, where she spent most of her time. It was not uncommon for her to go days without speaking to another human being. All this, and more, her killer knew. After five minutes of walking she heard the rattle of an engine behind her. A commercial vehicle, she thought. An old one, judging by the ragged engine note. Beatrice watched the glow of the headlamps spread like sunrise across the grass on either side of the roadway. She heard the engine lose power and begin to coast. She felt a gust of wind as the vehicle swept by. She choked on the stink of the exhaust. Then she watched as it pulled to the side of the road and stopped. The hand, visible in the bright moonlight, struck Beatrice as odd. It poked from the driver's-side window seconds after the van had stopped and beckoned her forward. A thick leather glove, Beatrice noted, the kind used by workmen who carry heavy things. A workman's overall -- dark blue, maybe. The hand beckoned once more. There it was again -- something about the way it moved wasn't quite right. She was an artist, and artists know about motion and flow. And there was something else. When the hand moved it exposed the skin between the end of the sleeve and the base of the glove. Even in the poor light Beatrice could see the skin was pale and hairless -- not like the wrist of any workman she had ever seen -- and uncommonly slender. Still, she felt no alarm. She quickened her pace and reached the passenger door in a few steps. She pulled open the door and set her things on the floor in front of the seat. Then she looked up into the van for the first time and noticed the driver was gone. Beatrice Pymm, in the final conscious seconds of her life, wondered why anyone would use a van to carry a motorcycle. It was there, resting on its side in the back, two jerry cans of petrol next to it. Still standing next to the van, she closed the door and called out. There was no answer. Seconds later she heard the sound of a leather boot on gravel. She heard the sound again, closer. She turned her head and saw the driver standing there. She looked to the face and saw only a black woolen mask. Two pools of pale blue stared coldly behind the eyeholes. Feminine-looking lips, parted slightly, glistened behind the slit for the mouth. Beatrice opened her mouth to scream. She managed only a brief gasp before the driver rammed a gloved hand into her mouth. The fingers dug into the soft flesh of her throat. The glove tasted horribly of dust, petrol, and dirty motor oil. Beatrice gagged, then vomited the remains of her picnic lunch -- roast chicken, Stilton cheese, red wine. Then she felt the other hand probing around her left breast. For an instant Beatrice thought her mother's fears about rape had finally been proved correct. But the hand touching her breast was not the hand of a molester or a rapist. The hand was skilled, like a doctor's, and curiously gentle. It moved from her breast to her ribs, pressing hard. Beatrice jerked, gasped, and bit down harder. The driver seemed not to feel it through the thick glove. The hand reached the bottom of her ribs and probed the soft flesh at the top of her abdomen. It went no farther. One finger remained pressed against the spot. Beatrice heard a sharp click. An instant of excruciating pain, a burst of brilliant white light. Then, a benevolent darkness. The killer had trained endlessly for this night, but it was the first time. The killer removed the gloved hand from the victim's mouth, turned, and was violently sick. There was no time for sentiment. The killer was a soldier -- a major in the secret service -- and Beatrice Pymm soon would be the enemy. Her death, while unfortunate, was necessary. The killer wiped away the vomit from the lips of the mask and set to work, taking hold of the stiletto and pulling. The wound sucked hard but the killer pulled harder, and the stiletto slipped out. An excellent kill, clean, very little blood. Vogel would be proud. The killer wiped the blood from the stiletto, snapped the blade back into place, and put it in the pocket of the overall. Then the killer grasped the body beneath the arms, dragged it to the rear of the van, and dumped it on the crumbling edge of the tarmac. The killer opened the rear doors. The body convulsed. It was a struggle to lift the body into the back of the van, but after a moment it was done. The engine hesitated, then fired. Then the van was on the move again, flashing through the darkened village and turning onto the deserted roadway. The killer, composed despite the presence of the body, quietly sang a song from childhood to help pass the time. It was a long drive, four hours at least. During the preparation the killer had driven the route by motorcycle, the same bike that now lay beside Beatrice Pymm. The drive would take much longer in the van. The engine had little power, the brakes were bad, and it pulled hard to the right. The killer vowed to steal a better one next time. Stab wounds to the heart, as a rule, do not kill instantly. Even if the weapon penetrates a chamber, the heart usually continues to beat for some time until the victim bleeds to death. As the van clattered along the roadway, Beatrice Pymm's chest cavity rapidly filled with blood. Her mind approached something close to a coma. She had some sense she was about to die. She remembered her mother's warnings about being alone late at night. She felt the wet stickiness of her own blood seeping out of her body into her shirt. She wondered if her painting had been damaged. She heard singing. Beautiful singing. It took some time, but she finally discerned that the driver was not singing in English. The song was German, the voice a woman's. Then Beatrice Pymm died. Excerpted from The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.