The Spy from Fifth Avenue: A World War II Thriller - Hardcover

by Galina Izraelev (Author)

1941. Nazi-occupied Ukraine. An American girl behind the enemy's desk. Hunted by Berlin. Betrayed and marked for death by Moscow.

The Spy from Fifth Avenue: A World War II Thriller explores a tragic, overlooked piece of history: American families who moved to the Soviet Union in the 1930s for a better life, only to find themselves trapped by Stalin's terror and thrust into the upheaval of World War II.

Sixteen-year-old Doro Gamburg works in the German Command Office, hiding her New York past and Jewish identity behind forged papers. Fluent in German and Russian, she acts as an indispensable translator to the Nazis-and a vital intelligence asset to the Soviet resistance.

Her only weapons are her languages, courage, and an inexplicable gift: vicious attack dogs fall silent at her feet-a strange ability her parents trace to a notorious psychic distant relative, Erik Jan Hanussen.

Doro isn't the only one hiding a dangerous past. Fighting alongside her is Paul, another American teenager and her childhood friend from Moscow. After his father is executed during Stalin's purges and his mother is sent to the Gulag, Doro's father smuggles him into Ukraine with fake documents. Four years later, Paul fights with the same underground unit connected to Doro's intelligence network.

When a resistance leader masterminds a desperate rescue operation, the two teenagers are given an almost impossible mission. Disguised as Gestapo officers with forged papers, they must lead a high-stakes operation to rescue prisoners marked for execution at Babyn Yar.

Doro's position in the German Command Office draws her into a classified Nazi uranium project that could shift the course of the war. What she discovers seals her fate. The Soviets mark her for death to bury the secret she was never meant to see.

At the same time, Berlin dispatches the ruthless SS inspector Frank von Bock to secure the project. An expert in uranium and a brilliant linguist, von Bock detects the one flaw everyone else misses-the faint Manhattan lilt beneath Doro's flawless German. The trap snaps shut. In this deadly game of deception, a single slip of the tongue is a death sentence.

Some secrets can win a war. Others can destroy those who uncover them.