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A psychological thriller set in present-day Prague is blended with tales of a Communist era interrogation, a Jewish antique dealer planning his escape from Prague on the eve of the Nazi invasion, a serial killer, a gangster known as Rumpelstiltskin, the alchemists Edward Kelley, and a legendary watch purported to grant eternal life. Lee Holloway travels to Prague to learn the truth behind his brother’s mysterious death there five years earlier, and soon his own life is in danger. Fascinating, quirky, surprising, mysterious, dark and intriguing – this novel has unexpected twists and turns throughout.

This is the gripping story (depicted with embellishments in the hit movie Argo) of the “exfiltration” of six Americans who escaped the 1979 Iranian seizure of our Tehran embassy. Written by the CIA operative who engineered the rescue, the book provides amazing details of the operation as well as background on the art of disguise, and, without resorting to Hollywood exaggerations, creates breath-catching suspense. For anyone who enjoys spy novels, international intrigue, history, secret identities, CIA, Hollywood – this true story reads like a thriller because it is!

A compelling blend of history and personal family memories. Through the prism of her native country Czechoslovakia – sacrificed to Hitler by the Munich appeasement, occupied by the Nazis during WWII, hijacked by a communist coup in 1948 in the early days of the Cold War – Madeleine Albright provides a rare but relevant perspective to these momentous years, fleshing out the historical facts with the experiences of her own family in exile (her father was a Czechoslovak diplomat) and the story of her journey a half century later to learn the fates of her Jewish relatives in Czechoslovakia (more than 2 dozen family members died in the Holocaust). Despite the upheaval and darkness that characterized the years covered by this book, Albright always finds moments when the human spirit triumphs.