Flowers from Berlin Books

From Library Journal: This revised and re-edited classic espionage thriller follows FBI agent William Cochrane's efforts to stop a Nazi spy from assassinating FDR. Toss in a love affair with a British Secret Service operative and you have the makings of a page-turner. LJ's reviewer found the book "complex in characterization, crisp in dialogue, and thorough in its background" (LJ 3/15/85). Editorial ReviewsFrom Library JournalThis 1985 espionage thriller follows FBI agent William Cochran's efforts to stop a Nazi spy from assassinating FDR. Toss in a love affair with a British Secret Service operative and you have the makings of a page-turner. LJ's reviewer found the book "complex in characterization, crisp in dialogue, and thorough in its background" (LJ 3/15/85). "First rate!" - The Cleveland Plain-Dealer"A Chiller!" - Los Angeles Times"A Super spy novel!" The Savannah News-PresseIt is 1939. Roosevelt is winding down his second term in the White House. The Nazis have taken Austria, and Stalin’s Red Army is systematically eliminating the Kremlin’s enemies. Europe is going to hell in a handbasket. With isolationist sentiment running high in America, and the president’s popularity at an all-time low, Hitler seizes the moment and dispatches his secret weapon: An agent named 'Siegfried' who conceals himself behind the mask of middle-class America. A chameleon who can change identities and personalities at will. A cold-blooded killer who will win the war for Germany. A banker, linguist, and demolitions expert who has successfully infiltrated German intelligence, FBI Special Agent Thomas Cochrane is handpicked by Roosevelt for an impossible mission: To find Hitler’s spy before he carries out a plan that will remove the president from office at a critical moment in the century’s history. As Cochrane, with the help of British Intelligence agent Laura Worthington, circles closer to his elusive quarry, a spy with supporters in the highest levels of U.S. government readies the world stage for a final act of annihilation that will alter the tide of war--and the future of the free world--in unthinkable ways. Imagine a world where your most precious inalienable rights are denied. Where individual freedom is a thing of the past. Imagine World War II without FDR ...735,000 first mass market paperback printing.

'Return to Berlin' is the long-awaited sequel to Noel Hynd’s classic million-selling espionage novel, 'Flowers From Berlin'.It is early 1943 and the United States has been at war for more than a year. William Cochrane, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who was the central character in 'Flowers From Berlin', has enlisted in the United States Army. He has the commission of a major and is in New Jersey training for combat. Suddenly his military orders are countermanded by Washington. He is ordered to report immediately to the Office of Strategic Services in New York City. At OSS headquarters in New York, Cochrane, recently married, receives an assignment more perilous than combat. He is recruited into the fledgling wartime spy agency and assigned to travel to Europe. He is to make his way to Switzerland to meet with Alan Dulles, the Director of the OSS in Switzerland. There, if Cochrane is lucky enough to arrive, he will receive the second part of his orders: an espionage assignment. Under an assumed identity, Cochrane will make a heart-pounding return visit to Berlin, where he lived for a while in the 1930s. There is an assignment vital to the battle against Nazi Germany that only he, with his prior knowledge of people and places in Germany, can complete if he eludes capture by the ever-vigilant Gestapo. Or, with the odds heavily against his success in this assignment, will the assignment cost him his life? Rich in accurate historical detail, heavily evocative of the terrifying era, 'Return To Berlin' is a fast-moving action-packed thriller that will be one of the top American spy novels of Fall 2019. "Noel Hynd is a few notches above the Ludlums and Clancys of the world." - BooklistRaves for 'Flowers From Berlin' :"This espionage thriller follows FBI agent William Cochrane's efforts to stop a Nazi spy from assassinating FDR. Toss in a love affair with a British Secret Service operative and you have the makings of a page-turner. Complex in characterization, crisp in dialogue, and thorough in its background" - Library Journal "First rate!" - The Cleveland Plain-Dealer"A Chiller!" - Los Angeles Times"A Super spy novel!" The Savannah News-Presse

'Judgment in Berlin' is the third book in Noel Hynd’s Berlin series.It is 1948. World War Two is over, Hitler is dead. The Nuremberg trials have concluded. The Marshall Plan attempts to rebuild Europe, though Germany remains occupied by American, British, French, and Soviet military forces. William Thomas Cochrane, an American intelligence agent, is in England with his wife, Laura, visiting friends and family. Bill Cochrane has accepted an invitation to be a guest lecturer for one year at the University of Cambridge. But when summer arrives, so does the first major international crisis of the postwar years. Under Joseph Stalin’s orders, the Soviet Union employs the Red Army to block the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. The Berlin Blockade is retaliation for the Western powers’ attempt to institute a pro-Western currency, the Deutschmark, throughout Germany, including Berlin, the former capital. The Soviets offer to end the blockade if the Western Allies withdraw the newly introduced currency from West Berlin. The Allies refuse. But there is no mistaking Soviet tenacity. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov proclaims, "What happens to Berlin, happens to Germany. What happens to Germany, happens to Europe."“And what happens to Europe, happens to the world,” President Harry Truman angrily retorts in Washington. “If we can’t supply Berlin by train or truck or boat, well, then, we’ll damned well bring everything in by airplane!” There is no mistaking the irony: the United States may have been on the winning side of World War Two, but the postwar years quickly have turned old alliances upside down. Americans now defend the enemy capital they bombed just a few years earlier. Truman’s words are barely dry in the ink of world newspapers when American and British military aircraft begin a joint operation in support of Berlin, the Berlin Airlift, one of the most iconic “peacetime” operations of the twentieth century. Military aircrews from Canada, New Zealand, France, and South Africa soon join the Americans and the British, flying more than two hundred thousand sorties in the next fifteen months. The airlift will provide West Berliners essentials such as fuel, fresh water, and food. But is it also a potential flashpoint for another world war? As the airlift begins, Bill Cochrane’s phone rings in the middle of a balmy, summer night in Cambridge. The lecturing plans and a month of vacationing will have to wait. There are other events surrounding the Blockade and the Airlift that do not make the front pages, and those are the events dealt with in back alleys and dark corridors by men like Bill Cochrane.Cochrane’s country is calling him back to active duty for a special assignment in the newly divided Germany, one which will take him behind newly drawn enemy lines and into a perilous netherworld of ruthless black marketeers, petty criminals, prostitutes, ex-Nazis, and Soviet spies.Cochrane has participated in dangerous covert operations in Germany twice in the past, barely escaping with his life both times. But now things are different. Onetime Soviet peers are now suspected enemies and an assortment of ex-Nazis may or may not be his new best friends. Old acquaintances from his previous visits to Germany reemerge, but why? An old gang of adversaries still lurks in the shadows that surround Cochrane’s new operation, waiting perhaps for a moment of lethal payback.Espionage fans who read and enjoyed 'Flowers from Berlin' and 'Return to Berlin' will savor the return of Thomas Cochrane. Rich in detail, compelling in its re-creation of history, 'Judgment in Berlin ' is historical World War Two spy fiction at its best. ***“The Berlin Airlift was the first clear Soviet defeat in the Cold War. It’s the one thing that the Soviets started and failed to finish.” - Diplomatic historian John Gaddis of Yale University.

In this, the fourth installment of Noel Hynd’s hugely popular Flowers from Berlin series, William Thomas Cochrane returns to Berlin as part of a permanent intelligence posting, replacing an old friend. Cochrane has a special knowledge of Berlin and its people, having worked there undercover during the Hitler era, during World War II, and during the successful 1948-49 airlift. But before Cochrane can safely settle his family in Berlin, he finds himself investigating the suspicious death of the man he succeeded. It is now the early 1950s. The former capital of Nazi Germany has emerged as the most volatile flashpoint of the Cold War. In Washington, Dwight Eisenhower is the newly elected President of the United States. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin is gravely ill but more aggressive than ever. He rules a Soviet Union that has gone from a backward nation to a world power in four decades. Emboldened now by atomic weapons, the Soviets are hell-bent on forcing the Western Powers – France, Great Britain, and the United States – out of the still-divided former capital. The pro-Moscow Communist government of East Germany controls East Berlin while the United States and its wartime allies control the other half of the city. And that is only where Cochrane’s problems begin. Soon after his return, a simmering labor conflict explodes between East German workers and their government. The government demands increases in work quotas but without an increase in state-subsidized pay. Shortages of food and clothing accompany the rationing of electricity. A strike among construction workers grows into a mass protest involving fifty thousand East German citizens. Some Berliners in the angry protest demand the removal of the pro-Moscow East German government. East German police and Soviet troops move in and fire on the crowd, killing hundreds. Within days of his arrival, Bill Cochrane faces a Berlin that is a more treacherous place than ever. Old friends come in and out of the rain and fog above the Rivers Spree and Havel. But so do old enemies. And so do some old friends who may actually be new enemies. Treachery and violence hang in the air, as do menace and betrayal. Berlin is a city where no one is safe, and nothing is sacred. People disappear. Traitors are everywhere. Murders are common. And then there is the biggest enemy of all: Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the Ministry for State Security, the new East German secret police agency. Modeled on the Soviet KGB, the “Stasi” has quickly become the most feared and vicious secret police agency in the postwar world. Quickly, Bill Cochrane realizes that the assignment confronting him will require a painstaking voyage through the murky, multi-faceted world of his own past and Soviet-American espionage. Within days of his arrival, Cochrane finds his life, his family, and his career under attack. But from where? From East Germany? From the KGB in Moscow? From an old adversary stepping out of the past? Or from a betrayal from within that is too venal and personal for him to even imagine, much less face? ** "Noel Hynd is a few notches above the Ludlums and Clancys of the world." - Booklist Raves for Flowers From Berlin : "A superb spy novel!" - Savannah News-Presse "A page-turner. Complex, crisp in dialogue, and thorough in its background" - Library Journal "First rate!" - The Cleveland Plain-Dealer "A Chiller! - LA Times Praise for Return to Berlin "A Compelling Spy Thriller of War-Torn Berlin" Lovers of World War Two stories will devour this stunning tale that is a perfect combination of knife-edge intrigue and history... Noel Hynd writes period fiction that is mesmerizing." Paul Collins, The Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph, January 30, 2020