Autumn 1915. World War I is raging across Europe but Woodrow Wilson has kept Americans out of the trenches-though that hasn't stopped young men and women from crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front. Christopher "Kit" Cobb, a Chicago reporter with a second job as undercover agent for the U.S. government, is officially in Paris doing a story on American ambulance drivers, but his intelligence handler, James Polk Trask, soon broadens his mission. City-dwelling civilians are meeting death by dynamite in a new string of bombings, and the German-speaking Kit seems just the man to figure out who is behind them-possibly a German operative who has snuck in with the waves of refugees coming in from the provinces and across the border in Belgium. But there are elements in this pursuit that will test Kit Cobb, in all his roles, to the very limits of his principles, wits, and talents for survival.
"[A] thrilling historical series . . . Butler does a terrific job of depicting both the journalist's facility for teasing information from his subjects and the spy's incessant fear of being discovered. There's something almost magical about the way the author re-creates this 1915 milieu."
Wall Street Journal, on The Empire of Night
"This high-spirited adventure by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler is an antic concoction of genre clichés, literary sendups, personal homages, fanciful history and passages of great writing."
New York Times Book Review, on The Hot Country
"[Butler's] writing is both crisp and thoughtful, his people ring true and he offers an amusing portrait of a golden age in journalism . . . A thinking person's thriller, the kind of exotic adventure that, in better days, would have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah."
