Christopher's Ghosts (new edn)

Charles McCarry

Christopher’s Ghosts is the new novel from the unrivalled master of intelligent American spy fiction. In an epic whose cinematic scope brings to life the tension and fear of Europe in the late 1930s, Charles McCarry takes the reader back in time, to the youth of CIA agent Paul Christopher in pre-war Berlin, to lay the foundations of one of the most remarkable characters in espionage fiction.

Against the backdrop of a city being strangled by the growing influence of the Nazis, as his desperate family struggle to negotiate a way out of Germany, the young Christopher’s first love affair falls victim to the ruthlessness of Hitler’s S.S.

Decades later, at the height of the Cold War, a remorseless S.S. officer emerges from the ruins of post-war Germany. His determination to destroy the last living witness to his savage crimes sets him on a collision course with Christopher and instigates a lethal game of cat-and-mouse. As he edges toward a final confrontation with a man capable of matching his tradecraft and his instincts, Christopher is forced to operate in the one theatre he had thought he had secured — his own past.

Writing with an acute sensitivity to the nuances of history and culture, masterful pacing, a feeling for the craft of espionage born of experience, and a subtle yet penetrating insight into the blood-soaked spectacle of 20th-century Europe, Charles McCarry delivers a haunting parable of a man — and an entire generation — confronting the ghosts of its own brutal history.