SHANGHAI

On Sale 6.25.24

In this dazzling thriller, New York Times bestselling author Joseph Kanon gives us his richest setting yet: pre-World War II Shanghai, where glamour and squalor exist side by side and murder is just a cost of doing business. A love affair against all odds, a city dancing on the rim of a volcano—Shanghai is the story of a political haven that becomes a minefield of conflicting loyalties.

After the violence of Kristallnacht (1938), European Jews, now desperate to emigrate, found the consular doors of the world closed to them. Only one port required no entry visa: Shanghai, a self-governing Western trading enclave in what was technically Chinese territory, a political anomaly that became an escape hatch—if you were lucky enough to afford a ticket on one of the great Lloyd liners sailing to the East and safety.

Daniel Lohr was one of the lucky ones—lucky enough to have escaped the Gestapo when his colleagues in the resistance were caught, lucky to have an uncle waiting in Shanghai, lucky to find a casual shipboard flirtation turn unexpectedly passionate. But even lucky refugees have to confront the reality of Shanghai. With all their assets, and passports confiscated by the Nazis, they arrive penniless and stateless in a tumultuous, nearly lawless city notorious for vice. When you can sink fast, how far are you willing to go to survive? What lines do you cross? As Daniel tries to navigate his way through his uncle’s world in Shanghai’s fabled nightlife, he finds himself increasingly ensnared in a maze where politics and crime are two sides of the same shiny coin. The trick, his uncle tells him, is to stay one step ahead. But how do you stay ahead of murder? How do you outrun your own past?

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THE BERLIN EXCHANGE

On Sale 2.22.22

From “master of the genre” (The Washington Post) Joseph Kanon, an espionage thriller set at the height of the Cold War, when a captured American who has spied for the KGB is swapped by the British and returns to East Berlin needing to know who arranged his release and what they want from him.

Berlin. 1963. The height of the Cold War. An early morning spy swap, not at the familiar setting for such exchanges, or at Checkpoint Charlie, where international visitors cross into the East, but at a more discreet border crossing, usually reserved for East German VIPs. The Communists are trading two American students caught helping people to escape over the wall and an aging MI6 operative. On the other side of the trade: Martin Keller, a physicist who once made headlines, but who then disappeared into the English prison system. Keller’s most critical possession: his American passport. Keller’s most ardent desire: to see his ex-wife Sabine and their young son.

The exchange is made with the formality characteristic of these swaps. But Martin has other questions: who asked for him? Who negotiated the deal? The KGB? He has worked for the service long enough to know that nothing happens by chance. They want him for something. Not physics—his expertise is out of date. Something else, which he cannot learn until he arrives in East Berlin, when suddenly the game is afoot.

Filled with intriguing characters, atmospheric detail, and plenty of action Kanon’s latest espionage thriller is one you won’t soon forget.

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THE ACCOMPLICE

Seventeen years after the fall of the Third Reich, Max Weill has never forgotten the atrocities he saw at Auschwitz—nor the face of Dr. Otto Schramm, a camp doctor who worked with Mengele on appalling experiments and who sent Max’s family to the gas chambers. As the war came to a close, Schramm was one of the many high-ranking former Nazi officers who managed to escape Germany for new lives in South America. On his death bed, Max asks his nephew Aaron Wiley—an American CIA desk analyst—to complete the task Max never could: to track down Otto in Argentina, capture him, and bring him back to Germany to stand trial.

Aaron travels to Buenos Aires and discovers a city where Nazis thrive in plain sight, mingling with Argentine high society. He ingratiates himself with Otto’s alluring but wounded daughter, whom he’s convinced is hiding her father. Enlisting the help of a German newspapers reporter, an Israeli agent, and the obliging CIA station chief in Buenos Aires, he hunts for Otto—a complicated monster, unexpectedly human but still capable of murder if cornered.

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DEFECTORS

The bestselling author returns on June 6, 2017 in America and June 1, 2017 in the UK with a fast-paced and richly imagined novel about an American spy, the Cold War’s most notorious defector, who fled Washington for the safety of Moscow-but never lost his talent for betrayal. Defectors is the gripping story of one family torn apart by their divided loyalties and a revealing look at Moscow at the height of the Cold War and the community of American and British defectors forced to make it their home. Kept apart from ordinary Russians, closely monitored by the KGB, granted special privileges but never trusted, these former spies now live under a kind of permanent house arrest in the society for which they have sacrificed everything, traitors who managed to escape one prison only to find themselves locked in another.

In 1949, Frank Weeks, fair-haired boy of the newly formed CIA, was exposed as a Communist spy and vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Now, twelve years later, he has written his memoirs, a KGB-approved project certain to be an international bestseller, and has asked his brother Simon, a respected New York publisher, to travel to Moscow to edit the manuscript. It’s a reunion Simon both longs for and dreads. The book is sure to be filled with mischief and misinformation, Frank’s motives suspect, the CIA hostile. But the chance to see Frank, his adored older brother, proves irresistible.
And at first Frank is still Frank-the same easy charm, the same jokes, the same bond of affection that transcends ideology. Then Simon begins to glimpse another Frank, still capable of deceit, still actively working for “the Service,” as he’s pulled into Frank’s twilit world, caught between the KGB and the CIA in a fatal scheme that pits the brothers against each other, like scorpions in a bottle, safe unless one of them attacks. But one always does.

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LEAVING BERLIN

From the bestselling author of Istanbul Passage—called a “fast-moving thinking man’s thriller” by The Wall Street Journal—comes a sweeping, atmospheric novel of postwar East Berlin, a city caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation. Berlin 1948. Almost four years after the war’s end, the city is still in ruins, a physical

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ISTANBUL PASSAGE

A neutral capital straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul has spent the war as a magnet for refugees and spies. Even American businessman Leon Bauer has been drawn into this shadow world, doing undercover odd jobs and courier runs for the Allied war effort. Now as the espionage community begins to pack up and an apprehensive… Read More

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STARDUST

Hollywood, 1945. Ben Collier has just arrived from wartorn Europe to find that his brother, Daniel, has died in mysterious circumstances. Why would a man with a beautiful wife, a successful career in the movies, and a heroic past choose to kill himself? Determined to uncover the truth, Ben enters the maze of the studio… Read More

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THE GOOD GERMAN

The bestselling author of Los Alamos and Alibi returns to 1945. Hitler has been defeated, and Berlin is divided into zones of occupation. Jake Geismar, an American correspondent who spent time in the city before the war, has returned to write about the Allied triumph while pursuing a more personal quest: his search for Lena, the married woman he left… Read More

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PRODIGAL SPY

Walter Kotlar is the epitome of the American dream, the son of working class immigrants who attends Yale and becomes part of the establishment, but he is caught up in the ’50s fear of the ‘red menace’ and forced to testify before the Committee on Un-American Activities. He seems a very unlikely Communist, but before… Read More

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ALIBI

It is 1946, and Adam Miller has come to Venice to visit his widowed mother and try to forget the horrors he has witnessed as a U.S. Army war crimes investigator in Germany. But when he falls in love with Claudia, a Jewish woman scarred by her devastating experiences during World War II, he is… Read More

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LOS ALAMOS

Spring 1945.  As work on the first atomic bomb nears completion on a remote mesa in New Mexico, Karl Bruner, a Manhattan Project security officer, is found murdered in nearby Santa Fe.  Is Bruner the victim of a violent sexual encounter, as the local police believe, or is his death a crime that threatens to jeopardize the… Read More

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