Berlin, 1948: World War II may be over, but a new era of conflict has begun. The Russians have cut off all access to the western part of Berlin in an attempt to seize it from the Allies. The thirst for power, dominance, and revenge is as strong as ever, and anti-Semitism is still rampant. When a store in West Berlin is vandalized with Swastikas, Sara Sturm, a German woman working for the US Department of Public Affairs, is dispatched to investigate, and meets Max and Karl Portnoy, two Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Sharing their stories of loss, Sara and Max form a bond. Max and his family were sent to a concentration camp during the war, where his parents and sister perished. The man who betrayed them, Nazi nuclear scientist Heinz Hoffman, is now a wanted criminal. Sara agrees to accompany them to Hoffman’s last known whereabouts, hoping they will finally be able to bring him to justice. But tracking the elusive Hoffman is not just difficult, it’s perilous. From the mountainous backroads of Bavaria to the Soviet border, Sara and Max race to evade assassins sent by the top-secret Odessa organization. And then there are other adversaries, hidden but no less lethal, determined to gain control of Hoffman and the knowledge he possesses-knowledge that may determine the course of countless wars to come.

October 1944: In the long, narrow undressing rooms in Auschwitz-Birkenau, prisoner Jakub Bak toils under the scrutiny of SS guards. Like other members of the Sonderkommando, Jakub was selected on arrival for an unthinkable job: sorting through the clothes of the dead and moving their bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoriums. Jakub clings to the promise he made to his murdered father-to live, at any cost-and to the moments he is able to spend in the company of Anna, imprisoned in the women’s camp.

Every morning, Anna marches miles to the union munitions factory where she works alongside other prisoners. Even Jakub doesn’t know that she and a few other women have been taking the ultimate risk, smuggling trace amounts of gunpowder back in their clothing. A bold plan is brewing to revolt against the SS and liberate the camp. Jakub, pressured to join the resistance, knows that any uprising faces impossible odds. Added to this already stark choice is another desperate reality-the risk from informers who see their only chance of survival in betraying their fellow Jews.

Powerfully moving and unflinching in its authenticity, Beyond the Wire tells of the women and men who, though outnumbered and outgunned, fought to free themselves, sparking a brilliant flash of light and hope amidst the darkest evil that humans can conceive.

September 1939: The conquering Nazis swarm through Warsaw as social worker Irena Sendler watches in dread from her apartment window. Already, the city’s poor go hungry. Irena wonders how she will continue to deliver food and supplies to those who need it most, including the forbidden Jews. The answer comes unexpectedly.

Dragged from her home in the night, Irena is brought before a Gestapo agent, Klaus Rein, who offers her a position running the city’s soup kitchens, all to maintain the illusion of order. Though loath to be working under the Germans, Irena learns there are ways to defy her new employer-including forging documents so that Jewish families receive food intended for Aryans. As Irena grows bolder, her interactions with Klaus become more fraught and perilous.

Klaus is unable to prove his suspicions against Irena-yet. But once Warsaw’s half-million Jews are confined to the ghetto, awaiting slow starvation or the death camps, Irena realizes that providing food is no longer enough. Recruited by the underground Polish resistance organization Zegota, she carries out an audacious scheme to rescue Jewish children. One by one, they are smuggled out in baskets and garbage carts, or led through dank sewers to safety-every success raising Klaus’s ire.

In the tradition of Saving Private Ryan and Bridge Over the River Kwai, bestselling author James D. Shipman delivers a powerful, action-packed novel that illustrates the long-buried secrets and unending costs of war-based on the true story of General Patton’s clandestine unauthorized raid on a World War II POW camp. March, 1945. Allied forces are battle-worn but wearily optimistic. Russia’s Red Army is advancing hard on Germany from the east, bolstering Allied troops moving in from the west and north. Soon, surely, Axis forces must accept defeat. Yet for Captain Jim Curtis, each day is a reminder of how unpredictable and uncertain warfare can be. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge after the Germans launched a devastating surprise attack, Curtis is imprisoned at a POW camp in Hammelburg, Bavaria. Conditions are grim. Inmates and guards alike are freezing and starving, with rations dwindling day by day. But whispers say General Patton’s troops are on the way, and the camp may soon be liberated. Indeed, fifty miles away, a task force of three hundred men is preparing to cross into Germany. With camps up and down the line, what makes Hammelburg so special they don’t know, but orders are orders. Yet their hopes of evading the enemy quickly evaporate. Wracked by poor judgment, insufficient arms, and bad luck, the raid unravels with shattering losses. The liberation inmates hoped for becomes a struggle for survival marked by a stark choice: stay, or risk escaping into danger-while leaving some behind. For Curtis, the decision is an even more personal test of loyalty, friendship, and the values for which one will die or kill. It will be another twenty years before the unsanctioned mission’s secret motivation becomes public knowledge, creating a controversy that will forever color Patton’s legacy and linger on in the lives of those who made it home at last-and the loved ones of those who did not.