Having read every book written by the author, Ronald H. Balson, I was looking forward to getting lost in this one. I am a huge fan of the WWII historical fiction genre and always look forward to a different aspect of the war. That was the case with this one. While the writing was a little cumbersome, I did appreciate getting to know Nathan and Allison and the focus of nuclear fission. I enjoyed the information the author shared about the discovery of a letter by Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt about the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. While romance was an aspect, it was not over the top and too cheesy.

While not my favorite book by the author, it still provided a background into the aspects of WWII and the dangers people were willing to face to help bring an end to Hitler’s reign of terror.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for my advanced review copy. All opinions and thoughts are my own.

For more reviews, please visit my blog at: https://www.msladybugsbookreviews.com/. Over 1000 reviews posted!

I enjoyed reading an Affair of Spies. This is the first historical fiction book I have read that has dealt with the nuclear threat that was present in WWII. Ronald Balson did an amazing job of presenting nuclear facts without overwhelming the reader. While I enjoyed the story line between all of the characters we are presented, there were times even for a fictional novel that all their escapes were believable.

Some historical fiction thrillers are great. Some aren’t. This was okay. I guess HF isn’t really for me.

Sergeant Nathan Silverman, who grew up in Berlin, is trained as a spy and sent to retrieve a German defector involved in the Nazi work on the bomb. He's accompanied by Dr. Allison Fisher, a brilliant nuclear physicist.

There are complications, one being the girlfriend (Lena) who had dropped Nathan because he is a Jew, and another a Luftwaffe major (Weber) they meet in Paris and who shows up again in Berlin.

There are regular close encounters, especially after Nathan tries to discover his family's fate. Bombs rain down on Berlin.

This is a thrilling read, with an education on nuclear physics along the way

no, this did not slay in the kate quinn the huntress way i wanted it to. a shame really because the premise is strong

This one was a surprise for me, and although I have always loved historical fiction, I found myself way more drawn to this story than I thought I would have been, which is always a great thing! Moreover, I learned so much more about the race for atomic energy and atomic warfare regarding The Manhattan Project than I knew before, and love how it was presented within the story so it didn't feel like cumbersome learning. This is story of courage and friendship, loyalty, and patriotism. Nathan is a Jewish, German-born intelligence officer in the American army during WWII, and is partnered with Dr. Allison Fisher, a prominent young female physicist, with the incredibly dangerous task to travel to Berlin to interrogate and ascertain the credibility of a notorious German scientist who wishes to defect. Felt a bit long at times, but it's full of intrigue and suspense, well written, engaging, and with sympathetic characters. This is definitely one to check out for lovers of WWII historical fiction! Thanks to Ronald H. Balson, the publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to review this arc.

I enjoyed the surprises and suspense throughout this book. It’s set during World War II. Nathan decides to enlist and is soon unexpectedly heading to Berlin for a secret military assignment. He’s working with a partner, Dr. Allison Fisher. Besides finishing their mission, Nathan hopes to find out information about his family as well. They find themselves in danger often along the way.

This was a great read and I bet it would be an even better movie!! Very tight and well paced. Well researched. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher!

Thank you to netgalley.com for this ARC.

Yet another book on WWII, but yet another perspective and this one is a good one. A Jewish man in the US army who has left Germany prior to the war but still has family ties there and a woman scientist are sent to Berlin in the midst of the war to find out secrets about the nuclear weapons program there.

This was very interesting and very well done. I feel like I learned a lot and was invested in the characters lives and actions.

I loved fiction book on world war two. Great insight into the Manhattan project which I was not that familiar. I was immediately involved in the characters and couldn’t put the book down.

Ronald H. Balson, author of Once We Were Brothers, has written another WWII novel. Once We Were Brothers focused on familial relations between a Jew and a Nazi during WWII intertwined with a mystery of identity in the present day.

However, An Affair of Spies has a different WWII focus. As the title suggests, it is a book of espionage. But not just any espionage— these agents are sent to evaluate the Nazis’ nuclear bomb program.

Though most of the main characters are fiction, many of the events surrounding the story are based on truth and I enjoyed all the Google trails it sent me on. (My search history is a bit bizarre right now and I may have used the term nuclear too many times…)

I think that’s what I liked most about this book—Balson’s attention to and inclusion of historical elements. Especially having recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Bomber Mafia, which doesn’t talk about nuclear bombs but the creation of bomb sightings, precision bombing, and napalm, it was interesting to learn about this side of the bomb.

Somehow WWII books still teach me new things.

This was an action driven book that was less intense than it would seem, but still interesting and suspenseful.


Brief Summary

Nathan Silverman is a Jew who managed to leave his home of Berlin, Germany, before things got too bad. But his parents and sister had to remain. He signed up for the US army as soon as he was able and was placed at the secret Ritchie Camp with other displaced Germans to prepare to help the US forces with interrogation and navigating the foreign areas.

But instead he is recruited to exfiltrate a German physicist who wishes to defect and provide the US with valuable knowledge of the German nuclear program.

Nathan will go on his mission with Dr. Fischer, a physicist who will be able to determine if the information the defector has is trustworthy and legit. To his surprise Dr. Fischer is a female— Allison— which of course puts the romantic spin on an otherwise prototypical WWII mission.

Can Nathan and Allison get in and out of Berlin without getting caught AND succeed in getting top secret information AND a defector out with them? AND can Nathan find his family alive and help them escape too? The stakes are high and more than once they must improvise their plans!


The History

I love learning things about history. So I’m dedicating a section of my review to talk about some of the things discussed/included in the book. If you don’t care about history, you can skip this part.

With all the WWII books I’ve read, I had not heard of the Ritchie Boys! It was a large group of German-speaking immigrants or Jewish refugees.

Wikipedia says, “They were used primarily for interrogation of prisoners on the front lines and counter-intelligence in Europe because of their knowledge of the German language and culture. They were also involved in the Nuremberg trials as prosecutors and translators…. A classified postwar report by the U.S. Army found that nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from the Ritchie Boys.”


Many historical figures surrounding these events and known for significant scientific discoveries and achievements were used in the story:

Dr. Leo Szilard
Lise Meitner
Otto Hahn
Dr. Robert Oppenheimer
Enrico Ferm
Albert Speer

The ALSOS mission and the Manhattan Project were real. The ALSOS mission successfully put German research personnel, including Hahn and Heisenberg which were mentioned in the book, into custody.

The Manhattan Project was the team tasked with creating an atomic bomb.

To determine how far along other countries were in this race, they needed to know what their access to uranium ore was, how and where they transported it; what their method of separating the uranium isotopes was; if they had a working reactor; if they had seen a chain reaction; their access to heavy water or graphite blocks, etc. (Do I sound like an intelligent scientist?)

Hitler obtained access to a lot of uranium ore through Czechoslovakia.

The ALSOs mission did recover a reactor in Haigerloch. But, as the book portrayed, the actual threat of the Nazi nuclear program was as Balson wrote it.

It sounds like the Nazi’s reactor that exploded in 1942 is only theorized to have been sabotaged so that part was a bit fictionalized by Balson.


Amos Alonzo Stagg Field, an used football stadium at the University of Chicago really did house the first nuclear reactor—called the Pile— underneath it. It was the site of the first artificial nuclear chain reaction and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965.


Balson briefly mentions the MS St. Louis ship that attempted to bring over 900 (mostly Jewish) passengers and refugees seeking asylum to Cuba. I wanted to know what came of it so here’s what I found: All but 22 were denied entry to Cuba. The US also did not allow them to disembark. Canada, likewise, denied them entry. The ship returned to Britain and between England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands they were given a place to go. Historians estimate that about 200 of those people ended up being murdered during the Holocaust. Finally in 2012 and 2018, the US and Canada respectively issued formal apologies for their failure to help all of those people.


The Twentieth Century Limited train from Chicago to New York was a real train that took 20 hours to travel between the two cities. Sounds like a fun trip.


Allison’s fictional character was from Iowa. Her father had 250 acres east of Ames to farm corn. (This is close to where I live!) She went to Iowa State University. Historically speaking, it was fun to find out that an ISU physical chemistry professor named Frank Spedding was recruited to oversee some of the nation’s top atomic chemists as part of the Manhattan project.

ISU had some of the equipment and space that they needed to study the structure of metals. They came up with an efficient way to purify uranium and brought an 11 pound brick of it to Chicago, eventually supplying the Chicago Lab with tons of uranium for their testing. Obviously there is also a building named after this guy.


One of the bombing raids Nathan and Allison endure while in Berlin was a real mission meant to take out a ball bearing plant. In the book Allison questions- “Six hundred men and sixty planes lost for a ball bearing plant?” If you want to understand the significance of the ball bearing plant, read The Bomber Mafia!

During one of the bombing raids the book talks of the Berlin Zoo being hit and animals escaping. I wanted to know if this was true. The Berlin Zoo did get bombed multiple times and most of the animals were killed by the blasts, but there was not some big escaping. The few animals that managed to get out were chased down and shot.


I learned that X-rays are also called Roentgen rays because Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen who “produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays or Röntgen rays.” (Wikipedia) Then he got element 111 named after him— roentgenium— which is a radioactive element with multiple unstable isotopes. I’m sure it’s not because Roentgen himself was unstable amiright?


The Science

If you don’t care about how a nuclear bomb works, you can skip this section.

I thought Balson did a pretty good job of talking about the science of the nuclear bomb in a way readers can understand. Here are some snippets to help you visualize how these bombs get made. Thankfully, it sounds harder than I originally realized.

“Today we know that certain heavy elements with an odd atomic mass, like uranium-235 or plutonium-239, when bombarded with a neutron, will absorb that neutron and split.”

“uranium-235 will absorb the neutron, change the element into barium, and release 2.4 other neutrons, creating heat and energy in the process.”

“There are only a few places on Earth where uraninite is found in abundant enough quantities to be mined: Canada, Russia, and the Congo are major sources… Uranium in its oxidized state is ninety-nine percent of the isotope uranium-238… Separating out the U-235 is called enriching the uranium.” (So only 1% of uranium ore that is mined is the needed uranium-235 isotope.)

“Simply put, physicists theorize that if you bombard an atom of uranium-235 with a neutron, you can cause a nuclear fission; that is, the atom will break apart, split. That splitting will release other neutrons which will bombard other uranium atoms causing other fissions, releasing quite a bit of heat and energy. We call that a chain reaction. If the amount of uranium is large enough, what we call a critical mass, and if the chain reaction is allowed to continue, it can cause quite an explosion.”

If you’re REALLY interested in how these bombs work, you can look at THIS How Stuff Works article.


Comments

I’m now going to have to visit Tiergarten and the Palace of Versailles at some point. I looked up pictures! Also regarding Versailles: the book mentioned how the Germans were stealing art from the museums. If you want a story surrounding that, read Mastering the Art of French Murder.


There were a few things I didn’t like.

At one point in the story, Nathan gets help from ‘a friend’ when he’s in a tight bind. But we never really find out why. I wish we would have gotten a more satisfying connection point there and reason for why the ‘helper’ was there doing what he did. Feels like a loose end that wasn’t tied up well.

Nathan mentions several times that he doesn’t trust Gunther (the defector) because of memories he has from growing up. This seemed like it was going to foreshadow something, but it ended up being anti-climactic. I wish there would have been a twist added in between Gunther and Nathan’s father that would have spoken to Nathan’s distrust. After all, Gunther passed off Nathan’s father’s work as his own, was a class-A liar, and took advantage of Nathan’s father’s willingness to bail him out multiple times. Just wish there could have been a little more karma there.

It also seemed like the prep for this mission was a bit insufficient. There were several times where Nathan asked his superior questions and essentially the answer was- ‘I don’t know. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.’ It seems like especially for such a top secret and important mission they would be a little more thorough in providing contingency plans and cover stories for their new identities as they enter NAZI GERMANY. But maybe that’s just me.

Oh, that reminds me. Nathan’s stream of consciousness is mostly just questions. It was his most feminine quality I think haha.


Recommendation

I really enjoyed this book. I appreciated that it didn’t have much profanity and had no sexual content. I loved the attention to history and learning about the ‘nuclear’ aspect of the war.

I would recommend this book if you enjoy reading WWII novels or learning history. However, this was not a book that really Wow’d me. It’s possible it’s because I was interrupted a lot while reading and didn’t get to read many long chunks at a time. It’s always harder to get as invested in books that way.

I can’t really think of a specific reason NOT to read this book but it’s not going to be the best WWII novel out there. I feel like it won’t top your list but you also won’t be disappointed in it.

Now I feel like my recommendation is a bit lame. Really I think most people will enjoy this book, don’t let my qualifiers scare you off!


[Content Advisory: no f-words, 10 s-words; no sexual content]

**Received an ARC via NetGalley**

Thank you to St Martin's Press and NetGalley for an advance e-book in exchange for an honest review.

An interesting fictional account of experiments done by the Americans and German scientists into the invention of the nuclear bomb.
Nathan Silverman was born in Germany but escaped as a teen, with the help of his family in the late 1930's. As the war progresses, he enlists as soon as he is able and with his language skills , is sent to an elite unit for training to infiltrate Germany. He is soon recruited for a special mission to help a German physicist defect to America with information that could help advance the Americans own nuclear project.
With the help of a young scientist, Dr Allison Fisher, they will enter Germany to try and extract the scientist with as much of the research from the German program as they can.
Nathan also has an ulterior motive to this mission, to find his Jewish family in hopes that they are still alive and get them out of Germany if possible. His father is a physicist working on the same research, his knowledge might be the only thing keeping his wife and daughter alive.

Interesting story but Nathan's character was hopelessly naïve and trusted people that he obviously shouldn't have. There were several times in the story where he was facing imminent death and just like a cat with nine lives, he managed to survive.
Enjoyed the story for the most part, even with all the "how can you be so stupid" moments.

I loved this book! I read a lot of WW2 fiction, so the writing really needs to stand out to get high praise. This book was mesmerizing through and through. It should be a movie!

I am a member of the American Library Association Reading List Award Committee. This title was suggested for the 2023 list. It was not nominated for the award. The complete list of winners and shortlisted titles is at <a href="https://rusaupdate.org/2023/01/2023-reading-list-announced-years-best-in-genre-fiction-for-adult-readers/">

While there were many aspects of the story that I enjoyed such as the history and the science, overall it was uneven and awkward. The decisions and actions of the protagonists were especially frustrating and seemed to be a ploy to introduce danger in order to move the action forward.

I loved this author's book Once We Were Brothers but I didn't feel this one was quite in the same league. Still, there were many things to enjoy about the book and historical fiction readers will still find it interesting. My thanks, as always, to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley.

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* This was different than expected. i like reading ww2 books and rarely find a bad one, happy to say this one was a good one! would recommend!

I found this book unenjoyable. Despite this being an area that I am always interested in reading I could not get into the story. Nothing was keeping my attention.

No stranger to writing historical novels, Ronald H Balson has produced An Affair of Spies, a very interesting historical romance thriller. I really enjoyed this novel - historical romance thriller/mystery is my favorite niche category - as I learned a lot amidst an action-packed book. I’d give this novel five out of five stars for being the total package.

Nathan Silverman is a Jewish refugee in America, the only one his family could afford to send to the US in the years leading up to WWII. He’s a private in the army, training at Camp Ritchie to go over to Europe when the US enters the war. However, other plans are made for him when he finds himself ordered to New York to join the Manhattan Project. A physicist wants to defect from Germany and Nathan’s job is to escort him and a US physicist - who will verify the information - out from behind enemy lines. Of course, first, he and Dr. Fisher must get behind enemy lines.

The premise of An Affair of Spies was interesting enough, but to add to the intrigue, Nathan knows the scientist that’s defecting to the US because his father (also a physicist) worked with him. His intimate knowledge of the people, language, and his hometown make Nathan an ideal candidate for this mission. Nathan also has a personal mission: to see if he can locate his family, who he hasn’t heard from for years.
You’ll note that I’ve written an intriguing synopsis of An Affair of Spies - if you don’t want to read this book yet, you probably never will - without actually mentioning the Affair part. Dr. Fisher is actually Dr. Allison Fisher, a young scientist involved with the manhattan project. She masquerades as Nathan’s girlfriend, and the fraught danger the two experience, and what they learn about each other through it, leads them to develop a deeper connection than they thought.

Have I enticed you to read this book yet??

I thought this book was fantastic; I could tell that it was meticulously researched from the details of the Manhattan Project, to the geography of the German landscape and research sites, to the details of the Hauptmann uniform that Nathan wears. I love books that educate me while I’m being entertained by the story, and An Affair of Spies married those two elements really well.
An Affair of Spies was also true to its genre of historical romance thriller; obviously, it hit the historical part, but it was really a thriller as well. Nathan and Dr. Fisher are operating under the noses of the Nazi regime, who scrutinize everything, and they get into trouble more than once with officials and have to make quick getaways. It was definitely a tense book, but the emotional side of Nathan searching for his family, engaging with Dr. Fisher, and the camaraderie he finds among allies helped to balance out the tense moments.
In terms of romance, it was very soft, where the chemistry (no pun intended) between Nathan and Dr. Fisher was hinted at throughout the book, but not acknowledged until the end of their mission. While I usually do like the dirtier type of romance, I thought a softer romance was totally appropriate for the tense situation in which the characters found themselves. There’s no time to contemplate your emotions for someone else when you’re in a life-or-death situation, and both Nathan and Dr. Fisher were very rational about not dealing with their feelings until after their mission was finished.

I feel I’ve said enough about this book - if you’re not interested by now, you probably won’t be! An Affair of Spies was an excellent read and I’d recommend it to anyone who wanted an entertaining and thrilling novel.

This story grabbed from the start and did not let go until the end! I highly recommend.

Many thanks to Netgalley and St Martins Press for this advanced readers copy.

Nathan Silverman was one of the lucky ones; a Jewish man who left Germany right before the deportations. His cousin sponsored him in New York, and after attending college, Nathan joined the United States Army, determined to help defeat the Nazi regime. He was accepted into an elite group, trained to infiltrate and gather information, and Nathan was stunned when he was chosen for a particular mission requiring him to escort a nuclear scientist into Berlin to assist a scientist in defecting. Nathan secretly hoped he could locate his family and rescue them as well.

Dr. Allison Fisher was content with her research position in Chicago, where she was working in nuclear science. She was a necessary part of Nathan’s mission to assess the German scientist’s knowledge and the progress Germany had made towards building a nuclear weapon. Though she was uneasy, Allison agreed, and she and Nathan, under false identities, began their journey to Berlin.

I enjoyed the story, and appreciated the drama and excitement, but there were a few things that bothered me. Why would Nathan return to Berlin, to the institute where his father had worked for years, to help a nuclear scientist escape the Nazis? Wouldn’t someone recognize him as Silverman’s son, even disguised as a Nazi soldier? And Allison didn’t speak German, yet she was sent into enemy territory? And the OSS agreed that he could bring along extra people during their escape from Germany? I don’t know. Those few points didn’t really line up for me.