The Quest for Anna Klein

In 1939, Thomas Jefferson Danforth, a privileged man in his twenties, became embroiled in a plot that could have changed the world - a plot to kill Hitler. Now, in his ninety-first year, at the dawn of a troubled new era, he sits in the luxury of New York's Century Club and tells his tale to the young man from Washington he has summoned, for reasons of his own, to hear it. Danforth travelled to Europe to provide cover for a mysterious female assassin, Anna Klein, who posed as his secretary. Fuelled by the enigma of her origins, Danforth fell deeply and obsessively in love. Was she, as she claimed, an Armenian orphaned by the Turkish genocide of 1915? Which of the roles she played represents the real Anna Klein? The assassination was to take place at a Munich restaurant, but Hitler left early, and the conspirators were arrested by the Gestapo. To his surprise, Danforth was released, but of Anna there was no word. The plotters were betrayed - but why, and by whom? Was it possible that Anna herself could have been the traitor? These are the questions that shape Danforth's life and quest in the decades that follow. It is a journey of ever-shifting alliances and betrayals that will lead him across a war-torn world, from the ruins of Berlin to the Road of Skulls in Stalin's gulag archipelago, from a hovel in the Ukraine to the Caspian port of Baku, in search of the answers that will piece together the real story of Anna Klein.

ISBN 0857892592   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9780857892591 (What's this?)   Pages 352 Publisher Atlantic Books   Published in London Imprint Atlantic Books   Height (mm) 234 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 156 Publication date 01 Sep 2011   Academic level General DEWEY 813.6

"Edgar-nominee Cook ("The Last Talk with Lola Faye," 2010, etc.) plays the spy game in this mystery adventure. Soon after 9/11, Paul Crane, a young think-tank researcher, interviews Thomas Danforth, an elderly New York City resident who believes he has information relevant to defending America against fanatics. Danforth wants the meeting because Crane wrote an article demanding a revenge-filled response to 9/11. Crane is skeptical, but Danforth unfolds a tale that begins in 1939, when he ran his father's import business. With the war imminent, Danforth was lured into an anti-Nazi conspiracy by his college friend, Robert Clayton. Other characters enter, including Ted Bannion, a disillusioned Spanish Civil War loyalist, and Anna Klein, a mysterious and beautiful young linguist. Captivated by Anna, Danforth accompanies her to Europe, where, with Bannion's help, she intends to organize Spanish Loyalists interned in France into an anti-Nazi force. That scheme fails. The three then decide Danforth will pose as an art dealer seeking Hitler's paintings. The plan is assassination, but the　Gestapo　intervenes. Bannion takes cyanide. Klein, by now the object of Danforth's passion, is captured. But because of his father's connections, Danforth is simply deported from Nazi Germany. The narrative regularly shifts from the interview to Danforth's adventures in the abattoir that was Europe in the 1940s, where he sought to learn Anna's fate. Clues hint Anna was a double or triple agent, and Danforth is eventually sent to the Soviet Union to determine her identity. There he's taken for a spy and sent to the gulag　for 12 years. As the story unfolds, Danforth pushes and prods the callow Crane toward understanding the complexity of moral choices, the shadows that obscure love and loyalty and the perils of cause becoming obsession. Absent one minor point, Cook's plot is as captivating as his characters. It's rendered in an often ear-pleasing literary style-- "the sewe

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