Umnitsa: The Good Girl

Here are John Le Carré, Herman Wouk, and Boris Pasternak all rolled into one John T. Cullen. Umnitsa (in Russian, 'good girl' or 'clever girl') is a novel of love, danger, and global atomic espionage spanning four continents and a group of intriguing lives during World War Two. It captures one of history’s most compelling moments—summer 1945 in San Francisco, intersection point of two epic wars (World War II and the Cold War) where spies come to their deadly dance, and nothing is as it seems. More than anything, Umnitsa is a grand love story, with powerful elements of betrayal, tragedy, and redemption. It is about the America that rose out of the world’s ashes to rule the globe. The novel’s breath-taking action is global--spanning the desert shores of South Atlantic Africa to the uranium mines of Congo, from the bombed out ruins of London during the Blitz to the sexed up hotels and dance halls of San Francisco—even as atomic bomb parts are being moved through town toward a rendez-vous on Tinian, and then two doomed Japanese cities. Tim Nordhall is a young U.S. Navy officer and a spy. His adventuresultimately take him to San Francisco, City of Love. There, he an unusual love triangle with two remarkable women—the one a Middle Eastern assassin masquerading as a secretary at the founding of the United Nations; the other a daring test pilot. There is even a chance meeting with a young, shifty-eyed Richard Nixon as a transient Quartermaster officer in an elegant Nob Hill hotel. San Francisco, at that critical moment in history, on the cusp between two epic wars, is a city of love, mystery, and rainy streets. Spy cars fly by with chattering machine guns, criss-crossing police cars with wailing sirens. It is a city of frightened eyes in dark doorways, of dangerous meetings in alleys, of tires sizzling on rainy cobblestones. But it is also a city of love, with thundering surf, and dazzling full moons, and intrigue in every stolen kiss.