Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

Marlowe thinks he's found his first big headline in the attempted assassination of a priest-the bullet miraculously rebounding off the holy man's cross. Employing a young pickpocket to help him uncover the identity of the sniper, Cobb is soon led into a far more dangerous story: the advancement of German officials coming into the city from ammunition ships docked in the port. Then, when Cobb falls for a young Mexican laundress, he believes he's found a soft respite from hard news. If only she were as innocent as she seems.

It's 1915, World War I is in full swing, and foreign correspondent Christopher "Kit" Marlowe Cobb is tasked with following a German intellectual and possible secret service agent traveling on the British ocean liner Lusitania. But Cobb is soon distracted from his mission by the sultry Selene Bourgani, a world-renowned silent film star who also appears to be working with German Intelligence. The more Cobb thinks he knows her, the less he really does. The secrets Selene harbors have the potential to set the whole international conflict further aflame-and they're ignited by a German U-boat attack off the Irish coast. From the perilous waters of the Atlantic, Cobb tails Selene first into London's darkest alleyways, then on to the powder keg that is Istanbul. Across the war-torn stages of Europe and the Middle East, Cobb must venture deep behind enemy lines, knowing full well he may not return.

In the first two books of his acclaimed Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, The Hot Country and The Star of Istanbul, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler captured the hearts of historical crime fiction fans with the artfulness of his World War I settings and his charismatic leading man, a Chicago journalist recruited by American intelligence. In The Empire of Night, it is 1915, and President Woodrow Wilson is still assessing the war's threat to the United States. After proving himself during the Lusitania mission, Kit is now a full-blown spy, working undercover in a castle on the Kentish coast owned by a suspected British government mole named Sir Albert Stockman. And Kit is again thrown together with a female spy – his own mother, the beautiful and mercurial Isabel Cobb, who also happens to be a world-famous stage actress. Starring in a touring production of Hamlet, Isabel's offstage role is to keep tabs on the supposed mole, an ardent fan of hers, while Kit tries to figure out Stockman's secret agenda. Following his mother and her escort from the relative safety of Britain into the lion's den of Berlin, Kit must remain in character, even under the very nose of the Kaiser.

Autumn 1915. World War I is raging across Europe but Woodrow Wilson has kept Americans out of the trenches-though that hasn't stopped young men and women from crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front. Christopher "Kit" Cobb, a Chicago reporter with a second job as undercover agent for the U.S. government, is officially in Paris doing a story on American ambulance drivers, but his intelligence handler, James Polk Trask, soon broadens his mission. City-dwelling civilians are meeting death by dynamite in a new string of bombings, and the German-speaking Kit seems just the man to figure out who is behind them-possibly a German operative who has snuck in with the waves of refugees coming in from the provinces and across the border in Belgium. But there are elements in this pursuit that will test Kit Cobb, in all his roles, to the very limits of his principles, wits, and talents for survival.

A novel of murder and espionage during the First World War. Autumn 1915. World War I is raging across Europe, but Woodrow Wilson has kept Americans out of the trenches-though that hasn't stopped young men and women from crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front. Christopher "Kit" Cobb, a Chicago reporter with a second job as undercover agent for the U.S. government, is officially in Paris doing a story on American ambulance drivers, but his intelligence handler, James Polk Trask, soon broadens his mission. City-dwelling civilians are meeting death by dynamite in a new string of bombings, and the German-speaking Kit seems just the man to figure out who is behind them-possibly a German operative who has snuck in with the waves of refugees coming in from the provinces and across the border in Belgium. But there are elements in this pursuit that will test Kit Cobb, in all his roles, to the very limits of his principles, wits, and talents for survival. With Paris in the Dark, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler returns to his lauded Christopher Marlowe Cobb series and proves once again that he can craft "a ripping good yarn" (Wall Street Journal) with unmistakably literary underpinnings and a rich sense of the political and cultural atmosphere of the time.