Belgium, 1940: Posing as a friar, a British operative talks his way into the monastery at Villers-devant-Orval just before the Nazis plan to sweep through the area and whisk everything of value back to Berlin. That night, he adds an old leather Bible to the monastery's library and then escapes. London, 2017: A construction worker makes a grisly discovery-a skeletal arm-bone with a rusty handcuff attached to the wrist. 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. In the course of this riveting thriller, Lara will learn the significance of six musty Dictaphone cylinders recorded after D-Day by Noel Coward-actor, playwright and, secretly, a British agent reporting directly to Winston Churchill. She will understand precisely why that leather Bible, scooped up by the Nazis and deposited on the desk of Adolf Hitler days before he planned to attack Britain, played such a pivotal role in turning his 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

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