Merriam Press Historical Fiction Series. A war and spy novel as well as a mystery and a bildungsroman, this is the story of a poet recruited in the spring of 1943 to write poetry for coding and decoding messages in OSS. Jake Finny, a college senior in the reserves, believes he is escaping combat only to find himself dealing with a series of unexplained deaths in the Message Center. As he moves from Washington to Algiers to Italy, he fears for his life. He loses his best friend, goes AWOL and seeks those committing these crimes aided by the Italian girl his friend wanted to marry. As the pressure on him intensifies, he is haunted by the head of Counterintelligence, a famous poet whom he can’t determine whether he is sympathetic to him or thinks he is implicated in these deaths. The novel is not only about Jake and his situation but also about the workings of OSS and the conditions in Italy during the war.
