Joseph Kanon

"After the violence of Kristallnacht (1938), European Jews, now desperate to emigrate, found the consular doors of the world closed to them. Only one port required no entry visa: Shanghai, a self-governing Western trading enclave in what was technically Chinese territory, a political anomaly that became an escape hatch--if you were lucky enough to afford a ticket on one of the great Lloyd liners sailing to the East and safety. Daniel Lohr was one...

"Berlin. 1963. The height of the Cold War. An early morning spy swap, not at the familiar setting for such exchanges, or at Checkpoint Charlie, where international visitors cross into the East, but at a more discreet border crossing, usually reserved for East German VIPs. The Communists are trading two American students caught helping people to escape over the wall and a lower level CIA operative. On the other side of the trade: Martin Keller, a physicist...

"Seventeen years after the fall of the Third Reich, Max Weill has never forgotten the atrocities he saw as a prisoner at Auschwitz--nor the face of Dr. Otto Schramm, a camp doctor who worked with Mengele on appalling experiments and who sent Max's family to the gas chambers. As the war came to a close, Schramm was one of the many high-ranking former-Nazi officers who managed to escape Germany for new lives in South America, where leaders like Argentina's...

A "novel about an American spy, the Cold War's most notorious defector, who gave up his country for the safety--and prison--of Moscow, but never lost his gift for betrayal"--