The Bookworm

A stunning and surprising new thriller, Mitch Silver’s latest novel takes readers from a secret operation during World War II—with appearances by Noel Coward and Winston Churchill—to present day London and Moscow, where Lara Klimt, “the Bookworm,” must employ all her skills to prevent an international conspiracy.

Europe, 1940: Posing as a friar, a British operative talks his way into a Belgian monastery just before Nazi art thieves plan to whisk everything of value back to Berlin. But the ersatz man of the cloth is no thief. Instead, that night he adds an old leather Bible to the monastery’s library and then escapes.

London, 2017: A construction worker discovers a skeletal arm-bone with a rusty handcuff attached to the wrist, all that remains of a courier who died in a V-2 rocket attack. The woman who will put these two disparate events together—and understand the looming tragedy she must hurry to prevent—is Russian historian and former Soviet chess champion Larissa Mendelovg Klimt, “Lara the Bookworm,” to her friends. She’s also experiencing some woeful marital troubles.

Lara will learn the significance of six musty Dictaphone cylinders recorded after D-Day by Noel Coward—secretly, a British agent reporting directly to Winston Churchill—and understand precisely why that leather Bible played such a pivotal role in turning Hitler's guns to the East. And she will discover the new secret pact negotiated by the nefarious Russian president and his newly elected American counterpart—maverick and dealmaker—and the evil it portends.

Oh, and she’ll reconcile with her husband.

Mitch Silver was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island. He attended Yale (B.A. in History) and Harvard Law School (“I lasted three days. I know the law through Wednesday, but after that…”). He was an advertising writer for several of the big New York agencies, living in Paris for a year with his wife, Ellen Highsmith Silver, while he was European Creative Director on the Colgate-Palmolive account.

A previously published novelist (In Secret Service—S&S/Touchstone), Mitch and his wife Ellen live in Greenwich, Connecticut and have two children: Sloane is a nurse at Wake Forest Medical Center and Perry is an actor and the drummer for Sky Pony, a band in New York. Mitch also won the American Song Festival Lyric Grand Prize for "Sleeping Single in a Double Bed.” His blood type is O positive, and he always writes his biography in the third person. For more info, please go to mitchsilverauthor.com.