A Patriot in Berlin: A Novel

Piers Paul Read

Jun 2017 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

A Boston art historian in Russia becomes a pawn for a deadly KGB agent gone rogue in this thriller from the #1 New York Times –bestselling author.

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, three strangers converge on the newly unified city and become entangled in conspiracy and murder. Francesca McDermott, an elegant young art historian from Boston, arrives to curate an exhibition of Russian revolutionary art censored and suppressed under Stalin. The mysterious Dr. Andrei Serotkin, an arrogant but seductive colleague from Moscow, comes to assist her. And Nikolai Gerasimov is sent by the newly constituted FSB to track down Andrei Orlov, a rogue agent of the former KGB.

Then, in a villa in Germany, two émigré smugglers wanted in the theft of priceless Russian iconography are found dead—victims of a gruesome torture-murder. But they are only the first keys to unlocking the secrets of a conspiracy that has trapped Francesca as a pawn, drawing her deeper into a maze of betrayal and espionage of chaotic global impact.

A Patriot in Berlin "builds irresistibly . . . [and is] a thoughtful thriller that once you have finished you actually want to read over again" from the Somerset Maugham Award–winning author of Alive ( The New York Times).

About the author

Piers Paul Read, third son of poet and art critic Sir Herbert Read, was born in 1941, raised in North Yorkshire, and educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College. After studying history at Cambridge University, he spent two years in Germany, and on his return to London, worked as a subeditor on the Times Literary Supplement. His first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, was published in 1966. His fiction has won the Hawthornden Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Two of his novels, A Married Man and The Free Frenchman, have been adapted for television and a third, Monk Dawson, as a feature film. In 1974, Read wrote his first work of reportage, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which has since sold five million copies worldwide. A film of Alive was released in 1993, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke. His other works of nonfiction include Ablaze, an account of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl; The Templars, a history of the crusading military order; Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, and The Dreyfus Affair. Read is a fellow and member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Council of the Society of Authors. He lives in London.