William Shakespeare, Gary Taylor:Henry V
- Taschenbuch 2001, ISBN: 9780192814388
Fourth Estate Limited. Very Good. 4.37 x 0.79 x 7.01 inches. Paperback. 2001. 356 pages. Spine faded<br>In 1943, America thought it had rounded up all the German spies on its soil.… Mehr…
Fourth Estate Limited. Very Good. 4.37 x 0.79 x 7.01 inches. Paperback. 2001. 356 pages. Spine faded<br>In 1943, America thought it had rounded up all the German spies on its soil. Now Germany's greatest weap on - a woman with special talents, both for tradecraft and for de ath - is headed home with critical information about the still-de veloping 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 tha t he'd do anything to free his wife, a prisoner of a Polish conce ntration camp. This happens to be true. The question is: how much would he really do to set her free? Where are his loyalties exac tly? As the two spies play cat-and-mouse across three countries, the ambiguities deepen, each figure showing new sides, each actio n 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 Review In his debut no vel, 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 profess or. When her husband is hired to help develop the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Catherine, as she is known, uncovers the secret and r esolves to carry it to Germany at all costs. A Gathering of Spi es fuses the plots of Katarina and a British double agent, Winter botham, whose wife is incarcerated in a Polish prison camp. Winte rbotham 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 storm ing a British stronghold and retrieving a high-ranking German pri soner. Winterbotham, by contrast, is cerebral and unknown even to himself. His secret plots are revealed subtly. If there is a fl aw in A Gathering of Spies, it is that Altman's plots get too int ertwined. You might find yourself having to reread passages to ge t the buried implications. But Altman never commits the cardinal sin of obscuring important clues only to illuminate them in the l ast pages for the aha! conclusion. A Gathering of Spies represent s titans like Einstein, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Hitler with cas ual confidence--there to remind us that the stakes of this myster y are nothing less than the fate of the world. --Kathi Inman Bere ns --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition o f this title. From Publishers Weekly This atmospheric debut thri ller 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 housek eeper in Princeton, N.J., and married her employer. As the wife o f 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 L os Alamos, N.M. Taking advantage of her situation, Katarina finds a letter from Albert Einstein that details the plans for the A-b omb. Galvanized into action, she murders her way to several new i dentities in her quest to get her information to London, where he r former lover and fellow agent, Fritz Meissner, is stationed. Fr itz has ostensibly been recruited by the British as a double agen t working for Operation Double Cross, feeding misinformation to t he Germans. The Americans discover Katarina's true identity and t rail her to England, where they warn Andrew Taylor, head of MI5. He, in turn, recruits brilliant Prof. Harry Winterbotham to expos e Fritz and aid in the search for Katarina. Winterbotham agrees t o help, while hatching a secret plan to rescue his Jewish wife, w ho is trapped in Poland. In painting a perfect WWII British setti ng complete with quirky characters reeking of mutton and pipe tob acco, Altman belies his U.S. origins. But throw in Admiral Canari s's plot to assassinate Hitler, a double- or triple-cross in ever y chapter, covert Nazi submarines, a lighthouse and a plethora of bodies, and you get an irresistible page-turner from a welcome n ew voice in the genre. 75,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; foreign rights sold in Italy and the Netherlands. (July) Copyrig ht 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, Operat ion Double Cross, and the anti-Hitler conspiracy, which is rather too many subjects. Consequently, the story defaults to simplisti c 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 l etter to FDR recommending construction of extremely powerful bomb s of a new type. To warn her beloved Vaterland, she must get to E ngland and contact a fellow agent, whom the British have turned a s part of Double Cross. Walking into the trap, our antiheroine tu rns the tables with virtuosic martial arts and knife skills. Leav ing 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 W interbotham, a Double Cross dangle who poses as a disgruntled int elligence officer, is also waiting for the boat. After some more mayhem, he, not she, gets to Germany, where he is fed a message f or Churchill from military intelligence chief Wilhelm Canaris: Wi ll the British agree to an armistice in the event of an anti-Nazi coup? Altman is said to be writing a sequel, doubtless devoted t o the denouement of Canaris' inquiry and the further adventures o f femme fatale Katarina. Advertising will generate attention, but predictable Katarina and her operations lack the intricacies tha t impress spy-thriller buffs. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to a n out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Kirkus Reviews A debut suspenser chock-full of the requisite genre elem ents?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 un derstate 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 ump teen thousand different ways, has the beauty of sirens, and is mo tivated to the point of zealotry. We meet her first in New York i n 1933, where the far-seeing Nazis have planted her. By page thre e she's committed murder, her victim a blameless young woman whos e identity she appropriates. It's this act that eventually?plotti ng gets a bit shaky here?leads her to Los Alamos in time to cotto n onto atomic bomb secrets, which she's determined to deliver to the Fatherland. In the meantime, in England, Professor Harry Wint erbotham, an elderly, scholarly literature teacher, is following his own unlikely path into the espionage business. He's been recr uited by MI-5 to help perpetrate the famous ?Operation Double Cro ss,Â' the intricate feint that bamboozled the Germans into guessi ng wrong about D-Day. Though Winterbotham is no ideologue, he's n o less motivated than Katerina. He adores his wife Ruth. The Nazi s are holding her in Dachau, and Winterbotham has his own, very p rivate plan to gain her freedom no matter what the cost. Predicta bly, then, two paths are made to converge in order to stage a cli mactic confrontation. And so there they are?the old professor and the young Mata Hari?with their hands on each other's throats whi le the fate of nations hangs in the balance.Beatings, shootings, knifings, stranglings, some of it graphically detailed, most of i t competently handled?but all of it oh-so-familiar.First printing of 75,000; $100,000 ad/promo -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associat es, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of prin t or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author John Al tman is a graduate of Harvard, where he designed his own major, D evelopment and Construction of the Novel. Although the major requ ired 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 I t's unusual for a reader with a proper English accent to convinci ngly speak pure American. Page does it flawlessly in this excitin g tale of WWII espionage, making the Germans and even a cockney s eem 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 th e Nazi masters. A British professor turned double agent attempts to stop her--AND rescue his wife from a concentration camp. As th e unique plot twists and turns, it's clear the two are on a colli sion course. As a rule, this listener is not fond of British read ers--they tend to make the action seem slower--but Page is a clea r exception. His dynamic narration is crisp, and he moves the act ion 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. ., Fourth Estate Limited, 2001, 3, Oxford University Press. Good. 5.13 x 0.76 x 7.75 inches. Paperback. 1984. 352 pages. Cover worn. <br>The climax of Shakespeare's sequence o f English history plays, this book is a celebration of a young wa rrior-king. It is also a study of the costly exhilarations of war and of the penalties, as well as the glories of human greatness. ., Oxford University Press, 1984, 2.5<
