John Russell & Effi Koenen

By 1939, Anglo-American journalist John Russell has spent over a decade in Berlin, where his son lives with his mother. He writes human-interest pieces for British and American papers, avoiding the investigative journalism that could get him deported. But as World War II approaches, he faces having to leave his son as well as his girlfriend of several years, a beautiful German starlet. When an acquaintance from his old communist days approaches him to do some work for the Soviets, Russell is reluctant, but he is unable to resist the offer. He becomes involved in other dangerous activities, helping a Jewish family and a determined young American reporter. When the British and the Nazis notice his involvement with the Soviets, Russell is dragged into the murky world of warring intelligence services.

Summer, 1939. British journalist John Russell has just been granted American citizenship in exchange for agreeing to work for American intelligence when his girlfriend Effi is arrested by the Gestapo. Russell hoped his new nationality would let him safely stay in Berlin with Effi and his son, but now he's being blackmailed. To free Effi, he must agree to work for the Nazis. They know he has Soviet connections and want him to pass them false intelligence. Russell consents, but secretly offers his services to the Soviets instead-not for anything too dangerous, though, and only if they'll sneak him and Effi out of Germany if necessary. It's a good plan, but soon things become complicated. A Jewish girl has vanished, and Russell feels compelled to search for her. A woman from his past, a communist, reappears, insisting he help her reconnect with the Soviets, who turn out to demand more than Russell hoped. Meanwhile, Europe lurches toward war, and he must follow the latest stories-to places where American espionage assignments await him.

In the fall of 1941, Anglo-American journalist John Russell is still living in Berlin, tied to the increasingly alien city by his love for two Berliners: his fourteen-year-old son, Paul, and his longtime girlfriend, Effi. Forced to work for both German and American Intelligence, he's searching for a way out of Germany. Can he escape and take Effi with him?

In April 1945, Hitler's Reich is on the verge of extinction. Assaulted by Allied bombs and Soviet shells, ruled by Nazis with nothing to lose, Berlin has become the most dangerous place on earth. John Russell's son Paul is stationed on the Eastern Front with the German Army, awaiting the Soviets' final onslaught. In Berlin, Russell's girlfriend Effi has been living in disguise, helping fugitives to escape from Germany. With a Jewish orphan to care for, she's trying to outlast the Nazis. Russell hasn't heard from either of them since fleeing Germany in 1941. He is desperate to find out if they're alive and to protect them from the advancing Red Army. He flies to Moscow, seeking permission to enter Berlin with the Red Army as a journalist, but when the Soviet's arrest him as a spy, things look bleak-until they find a use for him that has him parachuting into Berlin behind German lines.

Paris, November 1945. John Russell is walking home along the banks of the Seine on a cold and misty evening when Soviet agent Yevgeny Shchepkin falls into step alongside him. Shchepkin tells Russell that the American intelligence will soon be asking him to undertake some low grade espionage on their behalf-assessing the strains between different sections of the German Communist Party-and that Shchepkin's own bosses in Moscow want him to accept the task and pass his findings on to them. He adds that refusal will put Russell's livelihood and life at risk, but that once he has accepted it, he'll find himself even further entangled in the Soviet net. It's a lose-lose situation. Shchepkin admits that his own survival now depends on his ability to utilize Russell. The only way out for the two of them is to make a deal with the Americans. If they can come up with something the Americans want or need badly enough, then perhaps Russell will be forgiven for handing German atomic secrets over to Moscow and Shchepkin might be offered the sort of sanctuary that also safeguards the lives of his wife and daughter in Moscow. Every decision Russell makes now is a dangerous one.

Berlin, early 1948. The city, still occupied by the four Allied powers, still largely in ruins, has become the cockpit of a new Cold War, and as spring unfolds its German inhabitants live in fear of the Soviets enforcing a Western withdrawal. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, the legacies of the War have become entangled in the new Soviet-American conflict, creating a world of bizarre and fleeting loyalties, a paradise for spies. John Russell works for both Stalin's NKVD and the newly-created CIA. He does as little for either as he can safely get away with, and between the tawdry tasks they set him-assessing dubious defectors in Trieste, running a spy ring in a Berlin VD clinic, rescuing ex-Nazis who might prove useful from Czechoslovakia-he seeks a way to cut himself loose. His partner Effi Koenen has an easier time, starring in a popular radio series and looking after their adopted daughter Rosa, until a woman she helped save in the War turns up on her doorstep, and admits to a child she left behind all those years before, a child now trapped behind the new iron curtain.

In this fascinating historical thriller, British journalist John Russell is adrift in a McCarthy-era Los Angeles, having left a life of international spying behind him-until his research into a wartime conspiracy brings him face-to-face with the perilous instability of a post-Stalin Berlin. Los Angeles, 1953. It has been five years since John Russell struck a deal with a high-ranking Soviet official, relieving Russell of his duty as double agent for Soviet and American intelligence. Now Russell lives a life of relative comfort in Los Angeles alongside his wife, Effi, a star on an American sitcom, and their adopted daughter, Rosa, a young artist on the cusp of adulthood. He has just begun work on a book investigating American firms that did business with Germany during Nazi occupation when he notices someone is tailing him all around Los Angeles. Has someone not taken kindly to his research? Or could it be that the deal Russell struck all those years ago has put him at risk yet again? The answer may lie in Berlin, where John and Effi decide to go, braving the political disorder of a city that was once their home. Historical crime icon David Downing thrills and intrigues in his latest episode in the life of the Russell family, as John Russell comes face to face with the sinister forces that have followed him from Hollywood to Berlin.

The prequel to David Downing's bestselling Station series introduces John Russell, an Englishman with a political past who must keep his head down as the Nazis solidify their power Berlin, 27 February 1933. A month after Hitler's inauguration as Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag parliament building is set ablaze. The Nazis use the torching to justify a campaign of terror against their political opponents. John Russell's recent separation from his wife threatens his right to reside in Germany and any meaningful relationship with his six-year-old son Paul. He has just secured work as a crime reporter for a Berlin newspaper, and the crimes which he has to report-the gruesome murder of a rent boy, the hit-and-run death of a professional genealogist, the suspicious disappearance of a Nazi-supporting celebrity fortune-teller-are increasingly entangled in the wider nightmare engulfing Germany. Each new investigation carries the risk of Russell's falling foul of the authorities, at a time when the rule of law has completely vanished, and the Nazis are running scores of pop-up detention centers, complete with torture chambers, in every corner of Berlin.