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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
In a drama that more than matches the global sweep of his previous bestseller, Time and Tide, novelist and historian Thomas Fleming tells a haunting love story set against one of the most perplexing and least explored chapters of World War II. In Berlin, beautiful Berthe von Hoffmann dreams of an angel in the depths, embracing her husband's submarine - and remembers Kristallnacht, when Hitler declared all-out war on the Jews. The stench of evil in that memory draws her to the headquarters of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, enigmatic head of the German secret service - and guiding spirit of the Schwarze Kapelle, the circle of courageous men and women who comprise the secret supremely dangerous resistance to Nazism. Aboard the USS Spencer Lewis off Iceland, Lieutenant Commander Jonathan Trumbull Talbot is denouncing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's unconstitutional undeclared war against Germany when a torpedo fired by Berthe's husband, Kapitanleutnant Ernst von Hoffmann, cuts the destroyer in half. Out of this conjunction grows a tormented tangle of love and jealousy and patriotic deceit when the three meet in Spain, after Pearl Harbor has catapulted America into the war. By that time Talbot's criticism of the president has wrecked both his naval career and his marriage to Annie Richman, daughter of a congressman whose power depends on FDR's political wizardry. When Talbot returns from Spain to urge negotiations with Canaris and other leaders of the German resistance, Annie, now a powerful journalist, becomes a player in the struggle for the mind of the intransigent, mortally ill president. At its gripping climax, Loyalties draws everyone into an anguished confrontation with the limits of patriotism and God's baffling role in the riddle of human destiny. From murderous contests between rival intelligence agencies in Spain to labyrinthine political machinations in Washington, London, and Berlin to warfare beneath the North Atlantic, Loyalites is a dazzling mosaic of me
