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Series
The Alex Kovacs series follows a Czech-born Viennese businessman who is drawn into espionage during the destruction of interwar Europe. Books one and two place him against the rise of Nazism and the approach of war; books three to seven follow his work in the French Resistance from occupied Lyon and Limoges to Paris and Normandy.
After 1945, Alex returns to a ruined Vienna but is recruited by the American-backed Gehlen Organization. Books eight to fifteen carry him through the early Cold War, Nazi escape networks and communist Eastern Europe. The continuing conflict is moral as well as political: Alex repeatedly questions the compromises demanded by agencies that claim to defend democracy while employing compromised men and covert violence.
Reading order
Vienna, late 1930s. Alex Kovacs works for his family’s mining business and travels regularly into Germany, giving an anti-Nazi intelligence network an opportunity to use him as a courier and observer. Austria’s independence is being undermined from within while Hitler’s government increases pressure from across the…
In 1939 Alex Kovacs is living in neutral Zurich after the fall of Austria and Czechoslovakia. His work in banking places him among diplomats, financial intermediaries and rival intelligence services, all attempting to determine when Hitler will turn west and how Germany will finance the campaign.…
After France’s defeat, Alex Kovacs and his wife Manon travel to Lyon and form a small Resistance network. Their work includes intelligence gathering, sabotage and the practical task of identifying collaborators, all conducted under the threat of Gestapo surveillance and collective punishment. Each success is temporary…
A failed escape operation leaves Alex bereaved and hidden near Limoges. He is absorbed into a Resistance environment divided among Gaullists, communists and local groups whose plans for liberation are inseparable from their ambitions for post-war France. Sabotage, assassination and retaliation test Alex’s judgement while grief…
By the fourth year of occupation, Paris is hungry, cold and dangerous for the radio operators and couriers linking Resistance cells to the outside world. A rapid series of arrests suggests that German direction-finding alone cannot explain how agents are being captured. Alex agrees to assume…
Alex joins a militant Jewish Resistance group in Paris because its members are prepared to fight when other organisations hesitate. Their decision to execute German soldiers provokes reprisals against civilians and sets off arrests that reach friends, children’s homes and the networks attempting to protect Jewish…
In 1944 the Allied landings transform the Resistance war in France. Alex moves through Normandy and toward Paris as sabotage and intelligence work give way to open combat, ruined towns and encounters with advancing Allied forces. Liberation does not end the violence. Reprisals against suspected collaborators,…
After the war Alex returns to Vienna and discovers that the city and his former life have been destroyed. An old contact recruits him into a new American-backed intelligence service staffed largely by former German military officers and focused on the growing Soviet threat. His first…
Working for the Gehlen Organization, Alex arrives in Istanbul expecting to gather intelligence on the Soviet bloc from a city divided between Europe and Asia. Instead he finds former Nazis, their enemies and Turkish security officials continuing conflicts that the end of the war failed to…
Alex is sent to Budapest to discover how power is distributed inside Hungary’s communist leadership. The city remains marked by wartime collaboration, siege and the rapid replacement of one authoritarian system by another, making every potential source vulnerable to both political and personal blackmail. His contacts…
In Tallinn, Alex performs the routine work of Cold War intelligence by recording rail movements, cargo and military activity. Estonia has endured Soviet occupation, Nazi rule and renewed Soviet control within a few years, leaving communities divided by collaboration, resistance and the fear of deportation. Alex…
The Gehlen Organization sends Alex to Bucharest after one of its agents dies during cooperation with an American-backed anti-communist operation. Local commandos are preparing sabotage behind the Iron Curtain, but the circumstances of the death suggest that the alliance conceals conflicting objectives. Alex must investigate his…
Alex returns to Prague for the first time since leaving Czechoslovakia as a teenager. His official task is to gather information on a communist regime eliminating private enterprise, expanding its secret police and using show trials to define enemies of the state. The journey also offers…
After a disastrous operation in Kraków, Alex is ordered away from espionage and attempts an ordinary life on the Baltic coast. Work and new relationships cannot silence his memories of a night in an abandoned warehouse or his uncertainty about who was responsible for what happened…
East Berlin, 1953. Posing as a disillusioned journalist, Alex works among the labourers building Stalinallee and encourages resentment over increased work quotas, low wages and poor living conditions. His mission is to turn economic protest into political pressure on Walter Ulbricht’s government. When the strike expands…