In three critically-acclaimed novels, (Herald Square, The North Building, and The Hill of Three Borders), author Jefferson Flanders brings the early Cold War years to life.
The trilogy features Dennis Collins, a veteran New York newspaperman, who is drawn into the twilight struggle between the Soviets and the West.
Herald Square, the first novel in the trilogy, set in 1949, introduces Dennis Collins, the man-about-town columnist of the New York Sentinel, whose career is on the upswing. Then his closest childhood friend, Morris Rose, asks Collins to safeguard microfilmed documents that he says will prove his innocence in a State Department loyalty investigation. Out of friendship, Collins reluctantly agrees to hold the microfilm for a week.
But Rose disappears from the scene, and FBI agents begin asking hard questions, Collins must solve a dangerous puzzle that somehow involves his friend, a shadowy former OSS officer, and a beautiful refugee, Karina, with a troubled past. When Collins discovers that both American and Soviet operatives desperately want the documents he is holding, he is drawn into a twilight struggle between intelligence agencies that will challenge his loyalties and test his courage.
Herald Square has been described as “Jimmy Breslin meets John le Carré” in the Huffington Post and as “well-written, action packed and engrossing” in the Washington Times.
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The North Building, set largely in 1951, finds columnist Dennis Collins returning to New York after covering the brutal Chosin Reservoir battle in Korea. He finds his newspaper closed down and New York on edge about a possible European war with the Russians. Collins is reluctantly drawn into an investigation of leaked American military secrets that focuses on the British diplomats Donald Maclean and Kim Philby (later exposed as members of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring).
As his search for the truth takes him to Washington, Paris, and London, Collins enters a shadowy world of intrigue where moral boundaries blur and the line between justice and revenge is easily crossed.
The North Building tells a story of love and personal redemption, seamlessly blending fact and fiction as it takes the reader from the foxholes of Korea to the corridors of power in the West, with the fate of nations, and individuals, hanging in the balance.
The novel has been praised as “a top-notch blend of historical fiction and spy drama” by ForeWord Reviews and a “suspenseful read to the very last page” in Midwest Book Reviews.
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The Hill of Three Borders begins in 1956 Budapest, where Morris Rose, a State Department official who defected to the Eastern Bloc in 1949, approaches the CIA and offers vital intelligence about Soviet spy networks in exchange for his return to the United States. Wary of being double-crossed, Rose insists on the involvement of his childhood friend, Dennis Collins, a veteran New York newsman, in his extraction from Hungary.
Collins reluctantly agrees to help, but once in Budapest he discovers that the KGB is hunting Rose, and that the mission may have been compromised by a CIA mole. When Hungarians unexpectedly rise in revolt, and Red Army tanks encircle the city, Collins must engineer a breakout before it’s too late.
The Hill of Three Borders skillfully recreates the heady atmosphere of the Hungarian uprising, when the world watched in wonder as the rebels of Budapest sought to bend the arc of history against long odds. This concluding novel in the First Trumpet trilogy tells a haunting story of love, courage, and redemption set in the darkest days of the early Cold War.
The novel has been praised by Pacific Book Reviews as “a triumphant addition to his well-crafted series…Flanders proves himself the consummate writer.”
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