A thrilling, never-before-told story about one family's shocking involvement as spies for the Nazis and Japanese during World War II, and the pivotal role they played in the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
It started with a letter from a screenwriter, asking for a story. Your family. World War II. Nazi spies. Christine Cohen was shocked and confused. When she asked her seventy-year-old father, Eberhard, what this might be, he evaded the answer, wriggled out of it, and then broke down in tears. He knew this day would come.The Queens, once a prominent family in Berlin, saw the rise of the Nazis as a way out of their troubled times. When the family's daughter, Eberhard's sister, Ruth, met Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels at a party, a romantic relationship developed.But Ruth was hiding a secret – she was half Jewish – and Goebbels found out. Instead of killing Ruth, Goebbels sent the entire Coen family to Hawaii, to work as spies half a world away. There, Ruth and her parents set up an elaborate spy operation from their home, just a few miles from Pearl Harbor, to protect Eberhard from the truth.They leaked secrets to the Japanese, leading to the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. After Eberhard's father is arrested and put on trial for his involvement in planning the attack, Eberhard learns the bitter truth about his family, and is faced with a decision that will change the course of the Quinn family forever.
Switching back and forth between Christine's discovery of her family secret and the unknown pasts of spies in Germany, Japan and Hawaii, A Family of Spies is fast-paced history at its finest, rewriting the narrative of the events of December 7, 1941.
