Lisbon, 1943. The last open door out of a burning continent — and a city where everyone is watching everyone.
Cal Brennan is an American newspaperman, or so his papers say. In truth he works quietly for Washington, moving through the cafes and consulates of neutral Portugal, tracking the trade in wolfram — the tungsten ore that both Berlin and the Allies need to keep their war machines turning. It is careful, patient, bloodless work.
Until Vera.
Vera Kowalska is a Polish exile with a ruined country behind her and a mission of her own: to kill the Abwehr officer who holds her sister's life as leverage. She and Brennan should be enemies. They become something far more dangerous.
What starts as mutual suspicion becomes an uneasy alliance — and then the one thing neither of them can afford: two people falling toward each other while each keeps the single secret that could get the other killed. In a city where love is just another kind of espionage, the truth is the most expensive thing there is, and someone always has to pay for it.
Set against the real history of wartime Lisbon — its spies and smugglers, its refugees waiting for a ship that may never come — The Wolfram Run is a story of loyalty, betrayal, and the terrible arithmetic of what we will trade to save the people we love.
Book One of the Cal Brennan Novels.
For readers of Alan Furst, Joseph Kanon, Kate Quinn, and Pam Jenoff.
