The Empire of Night

In the first two books of his critically acclaimed Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler won the hearts of historical crime fiction fans with the artfulness of his World War I settings and his charismatic leading man, a Chicago war correspondent recruited by American intelligence for dangerous missions overseas.In the third installment, 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 in The Star of Istanbul, Kit Cobb is now a full-blown secret agent, 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 one of the world’s most famous stage actresses. Starring in a touring production of Hamlet, Isabel’s offstage role is to keep tabs on the supposed mole, an ardent fan of hers. Meanwhile Kit, disguised as a reporter writing a feature on Isabel, tries to figure out Stockman’s secret agenda—and whether it has anything to do with the increasing number of Zeppelins filling England’s night skies. As he follows his mother and her escort from the relative safety of Britain into the lion’s den of Berlin, Kit must remain in character under the very nose of the Kaiser.Racing deep behind enemy lines, The Empire of Night is a richly detailed work of historical fiction, and a rip-roaring adventure story that plunges readers into the seductive world of international espionage, a world where no one can be trusted, not even one’s own mother.