an ordinary man spends A Life in the shadows

 BOOKS 1 and 2

PRE-WAR EUROPE

It is the late 1930s in Europe and the darkness is gathering. The Nazis are marching, both inside Austria and outside. What can one man do to make a difference?Alex Kovacs can see what’s coming – he can, all of his friends can, all of Vienna can. When an opportunity presents itself, a chance to thwart the Nazi invasion of Austria, he agrees to join an espionage network that will take advantage of his regular business trips to Germany to gather secret information. But a personal tragedy soon complicates Alex’s mission and entangles him with a suspicious Gestapo captain in ways that he never anticipated. It is a web he cannot escape. It is the beginning of his new life. He endures the smells and screams of a Gestapo torture chamber in Cologne, and a show trial conducted by Hitler’s second-in-command, and then the shooting and the terror of the Nazis crossing the Austrian border. And when he is exiled to Zurich, he somehow gets in even deeper. A web he cannot escape.

BOOKS 3 to 7:

WAR, FRANCE, and the resistance

France has been overrun and the Gestapo now controls the country with a sinister terror. The Resistance does what it can, at enormous personal risk to its members. But is it worth it? After the fall of France, Alex Kovacs and his wife, Manon, travel to her home in Lyon to continue the fight they began as espionage agents in Switzerland. Disillusioned by the leaders who ignored so many warnings and allowed France to be steamrollered by the Germans, they form a Resistance cell and sabotage the Nazis wherever they can. But the effects are fleeting even as the danger for them grows exponentially. And when that danger surrounds them, smothering them, Alex is forced to make the ultimate decision — to risk everything for his family and his cause.

And do it goes from there, the honor of the fight mixed with the despair, a concoction that never satisfies Alex — not in Lyon or Limoges, not in the Resistance snipers’ nests in Paris or the horrors of the camp at Drancy, not even with the arrival of the American army and the end of the fighting. Alex is not just a lost soul, but a man who wonders if he even has a soul anymore.

BOOKS 8 to 15:

a new war that never ends

The war is over, and Alex Kovacs has returned to his home in Vienna after his years of fighting for the French Resistance. He left Paris to avoid the constant reminders of what he had done for the Resistance, the people he killed, the compromises he made. But in Vienna, he feels anything but home. The city is a wreck, his old life no longer exists, and Alex is adrift until an unexpected employment offer arrives from an old friend. The job is to join up with a new intelligence agency staffed mostly by former German military men and supported by the United States, which needs their contacts in the east. His first task, though, is personal: to find the Gestapo agent who ruined his life in many ways, an unrepentant Nazi attempting to escape to South America through the Alps along the infamous rat line. 

That is how it begins. That is how Alex’s life at war enters its newest phase. He cannot escape. Through all of it — the ex-Nazis in Istanbul, the despair in Prague, the horror in Poland, all of it — Alex can’t get way. He knows no other existence. World War, Cold War, always war.