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In Progress: A Strange Country
A sequel to True Places - Historical Fiction/Literary Espionage Thriller
Ten years after the closing of America’s secret Black Chamber, Claire Winslow Simmons has built a new life in Washington, D.C. Now working as a cryptanalyst for the U.S. Navy, she has a husband, a young daughter, and a career deciphering the communications of a nation increasingly important to American security: Japan.
Then, in 1939, a new Japanese diplomatic cipher goes dark.
As Japan expands its reach across Asia, Claire and her colleagues can intercept the messages, but they can no longer read them. The Japanese have changed their diplomatic cipher system. The new system—code-named PURPLE—behaves unlike anything they have encountered before. Its patterns offer tantalizing clues, but the machine producing them remains a mystery.
Claire may be able to help.
A legitimate assignment for her former employer, United Chemicals, provides the opportunity to return to Tokyo, where she lived and worked fifteen years earlier. Officially, Claire has been loaned to the company by the State Department. In reality, she remains a Navy cryptanalyst with a second, secret assignment. Her instructions are deceptively simple: find out what is inside the box. What kind of machine is it? Who built it? Who maintains it? One fact may be enough to give America’s cryptanalysts the foothold they need.
But Tokyo is no longer the city Claire remembers, and the skills that once made her indispensable inside the Black Chamber may now place her in danger. She must discover whom she can trust, how much she can learn without revealing why she is looking—and, most importantly, when to stop searching and come home.
A sequel to True Places, A Strange Country returns to Claire Winslow’s world of codes, secrets, and uncertain truths—this time on the eve of a world war.
