The Bookworm

A stunning and surprising new thriller, Mitch Silver’s latest novel takes readers from a secret operation during World War II—with appearances by Noel Coward and Winston Churchill—to present day London and Moscow, where Lara Klimt, “the Bookworm,” must employ all her skills to prevent an international conspiracy.

Europe, 1940: Posing as a friar, a British operative talks his way into a Belgian monastery just before Nazi art thieves plan to whisk everything of value back to Berlin. But the ersatz man of the cloth is no thief. Instead, that night he adds an old leather Bible to the monastery’s library and then escapes.

London, 2017: A construction worker discovers a skeletal arm-bone with a rusty handcuff attached to the wrist, all that remains of a courier who died in a V-2 rocket attack. The woman who will put these two disparate events together—and understand the looming tragedy she must hurry to prevent—is Russian historian and former Soviet chess champion Larissa Mendelovg Klimt, “Lara the Bookworm,” to her friends. She’s also experiencing some woeful marital troubles.

Lara will learn the significance of six musty Dictaphone cylinders recorded after D-Day by Noel Coward—secretly, a British agent reporting directly to Winston Churchill—and understand precisely why that leather Bible played such a pivotal role in turning Hitler's guns to the East. And she will discover the new secret pact negotiated by the nefarious Russian president and his newly elected American counterpart—maverick and dealmaker—and the evil it portends.

Oh, and she’ll reconcile with her husband.