The Spy's Daughter — John T. Cullen

For nearly fifty years, Marianne has searched for her long-lost father, who stole the atomic bomb from Stalin and, along with this two wives, helped save the world. As the Soviet Union collapses in 1991, it is as if a sea were receding, and a tide going out that exposes the secrets of a lost century. In Paris, a wealthy countess (Marianne Didier), widowed and still beautiful in her late 40s, searches for the one lost man in her past: her father, a U.S. Navy officer and spy who disappeared in 1945 San Francisco. Leaving her family on a quest, she searches the world for any trace of Tim Nordhall. The search takes her from the brutal Siberian gulag, where she was born to a mother kidnapped by Stalin's secret police and used as bait to trap the one man the Soviet dictator wanted to kill above all others--Marianne's father. Her trail leads to atomic secrets in the wartime Belgian Congo, to London of the Blitz and V-2 bombings, and across the United States from New Hampshire, where captured Nazi sub U-234 was interned with atomic bomb materials, to San Francisco, where President Truman's two A-bombs were processed for shipping to Tinian and ultimately to devastate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Marian searches, the life and adventures of young Tim Nordall from 1942 to 1945 come to the forefront. We witness World War II from a new perspective, in glimpses amid night and fog across three continents. Marianne tracks down the man Stalin sent to kill her father -- a dreaded assassin code named Jaguar, whose library in 1991 Moscow contains many surprises. This is a yarn at times as surreal as the terrifying and epic events of a world war that would shape history for centuries to come. Marianne's journey has a smaller and more intimate purpose: a daughter's search for her father, starting at her mother's wind-swept grave on a lonely Siberian beach. Like life and fate, the world is round and what goes around comes around. It is a beach where Marianne as a tiny child used to stand with her mother, holding hands, and look across the sea toward mythical America, where her parents had once known love in rainy San Francisco, a city of love and mysteries. The Spy's Daughter is a historical suspense novel spanning nearly half a century and the entire globe, as well as two great wars that intersected in rainy, wartime San Francisco of 1945: the dying embers of World War II, and the brutal, shadowy beginnings of the Cold War. A sprawling, panoramic novel in the tradition of Herman Wouk (Winds of War) and Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago), it never loses sight of the minute human heart and its feelings, while vividly painting a broad, global canvas.