Showing results by author "Owen Matthews" in All Categories

Inspiration from one of the least known but most terrifying moments in modern history - when the fate of the world lay with a lone, nervous Soviet naval officer 100 meters under the Caribbean sea - lies at the heart of this breathtaking new Cold War thriller from the author of the acclaimed Black Sun.

1961. Hidden deep within the forests of central Soviet Russia is a place that doesn’t appear on any map: a city called Arzamas-16. Here a community of dedicated scientists, technicians and engineers are building the most powerful nuclear device the world will ever see - 3,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima. But 10 days before the bomb is to be tested, a young physicist is found dead. His body contains enough radioactive poison to kill thousands. The Arzamas authorities believe it is suicide - they want the corpse disposed of and the incident forgotten.

Richard Sorge was a man with two homelands. Born of a German father and a Russian mother in Baku in 1895, he moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. A member of the angry and deluded generation who found new, radical faiths after their experiences on the battlefields of the First World War, Sorge became a fanatical communist - and the Soviet Union’s most formidable spy.

Moskau, 1962. Alexander Wassin ist der Top-Agentenjäger des KGB. Als es gilt, einen Maulwurf im Kreml aufzuspüren, kommt nur er dafür infrage. Während die Spannungen zwischen Chruschtschow und Kennedy zunehmen und die Kubakrise auf ihren Höhepunkt zusteuert, ahnt Wassin nicht, dass das Schicksal der Welt bald vom Erfolg seiner Mission abhängt - und von der Geduld des Kapitäns einer sowjetischen U-Boot-Flotte, der weit unter dem Meer auf die Befehle seiner Kommandanten wartet, zu denen er den Kontakt verloren hat.

Sowjetunion, 1961: Major Alexander Vasin, Agent des KGB, wird mit einem Spezialauftrag in die isolierte Stadt Arsamas-16 geschickt. Er soll dort den mysteriösen Tod des jungen Physikers Fyodor Petrov untersuchen. In Arsamas-16 herrscht höchste Geheimhaltungsstufe, denn dort wird gerade die Testzündung der größten Wasserstoffbombe der Welt vorbereitet. Bei seinen Ermittlungen stößt Vasin auf eine Wand des Schweigens. Was versuchen die Forscher zu verbergen?

1963. In a desolate Russian penal colony, the radio broadcasts news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin's new posting as director of a gulag camp in the middle of the frozen tundra is far from a promotion. This is where disgraced agents, like Vasin, disappear - sent to die forgotten. And quietly. But tensions in the camp are running high and when a violent revolt breaks out, Vasin finds himself on the run. With him is a mysterious prisoner - who holds the key to the most dangerous secret in the world: who ordered Kennedy's murder.