2025 Gold Medal Award-Winner for Historical Fiction from Military Writers Society of America

A Gripping New Historical Fiction Geopolitical Thriller of WWII and the Cold War: It’s 1943 … World War II is raging across the pond … and a shy but brilliant Jewish-American young man—whose own father grew up on the mean streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—finds himself at Harvard … with no clue how he got in.

Miranda Armstadt’s new historical fiction geopolitical thriller—inspired by her own father’s time with the US State Department in 1950s Cold War Europe—takes listeners behind the scenes of the early years of the CIA and how it unfolded into a powerful government arm, as America pushed back against Communism after the war.

Along the way, we meet the beautiful daughter of a TV news pioneer, caught up in a web of deceit her own family doesn't know about … a dashing British viscount who steps out of the world of wealth and prestige in which he was raised … and a teenage Holocaust survivor who’s determined to succeed, despite losing his entire family to the Nazis.

Five years in the making, Armstadt has used volumes of family letters and photographs—and researched hundreds of CIA, State Department, and government and military memos—to create a fascinating story about how high-level intelligence operatives were scouted, trained and used to glean information in a world before computers.

With incredible insight into the real life of a Foreign Service officer, Armstadt weaves a vivid tableau of America and Britain’s intelligence operations from World War II through to the Kennedy administration of the 1960s and their aftermath—and how a life of secrecy affects everyone it touches.