The Sleeper

A schoolteacher enters a war of shadows to save his daughter from the 3rd Reich

David Ashby spent the last war killing Germans, and the years after falling in love with one. By the time Hitler comes to power, David has a half-German daughter, Karen, whom he loves more than life itself. So when Europe begins to slide toward war, and it becomes unsafe for an American to stay in the Fatherland, David does the only thing he can: He flees—and takes his daughter with him.

David takes refuge in England, becoming a teaching master at a quiet country boarding school, and places Karen with friends on the Cornwall coast. But Hitler will not part with a daughter of the 3rd Reich so easily. German intelligence sends a sleeper, a dormant agent awakened, to finish off David and recover his child, drawing the mild-mannered schoolteacher—and the British intelligence services—into the thick of a secret war. Caught between 2 armies of spies, David will do whatever it takes to preserve Karen’s freedom.

J. Robert Janes (b. 1935) is a mystery author best known for writing historical thrillers. Born in Toronto, he holds degrees in mining and geology, and worked as an engineer, university professor, and textbook author started he began writing fiction. He began his career as a novelist by writing young adult books, starting with The Odd-Lot Boys and the Tree-Fort War (1976). He wrote his last young adult novel, Murder in the Market, in 1985, by which time he had begun writing for adults, starting with the four-novel Richard Hagen series.

In 1992, Janes published Mayhem, the first in the long-running St-Cyr and Kohler series, for which he is best known. These police procedurals set in Nazi-occupied France have been praised for the author’s attention to historical detail, as well as their swift-moving plots. The thirteenth in the series, Bellringer, was published in 2012.