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Siberian Girl is a sweeping saga about wealthy French Countess Marianne Didier's 1992 global search for her parents, lost in the fog of both World War Two and the Cold War that followed. Marianne was adopted as an impoverished orphan of four, in 1950, from a remote, tiny frozen village on the dismal Pacific Coast of Siberia during Stalin's brutal regime.

Marianne's adoptive parents, a French/Parisian couple of wealth and title, raised her in Paris with the finest schools and culture money could buy. Yet, always in the back of her mind, she was conscious of her lost parents. Her father, a young U.S. Naval Intelligence officer in 1945 San Francisco, had helped foil a Stalinist spy plot to steal an atomic bomb off the dock as it was headed to Tinian for the drop on Japan. Her mother was one of several (not clear which) exotic women orbiting Lt. Cdr. Tim Nordall: including a U.S. Army Air Corps WAAF pilot, a Middle Eastern woman involved in the bureaucracy of establishing the United Nations in San Francisco that year, and an even more enigmatic, beautiful Polish army nurse and spy named Anna Stokowska.

Spans half the world and half a century through World War Two and the Cold War. Marianne is in her early 40s as the Soviet Union collapses in 1991, when the frame of this novel (series) opens with her sentimental and deadly dangerous search for her loved ones. Among the figures she encounters are Jaguar, a Soviet era spy for Stalin, whose mission was to kill Tim Nordall; and now he wants to help her; a British spy master in Canterbury; and other historic figures. While Marianne's search frames the story, the core concerns Lt. Tim Nordall's dangerous, often deadly adventures during World War Two. That inner core saga includes his shipwreck off Africa, capture as a slave in Mali, escape with two Nazi deserters who fly him to the uranium fields in the Belgian Congo, and many more adventures in a complex global network of espionage. Walk-ons include Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon as a young U.S. Navy officer, a future CIA director, and many other historic figures. We also spend a few chapters in U-234 (true story), the last Nazi submarine to flee Hitler's collapsing Third Reich with a gift of radioactive material and modern jet airplane parts, heading to Japan to enable the Empire to atom-bomb U.S. cities.

Parallel Stories. While we follow Marianne's quest, we get large chunks of earlier history in her father's life. Tim Nordhall was a young clock maker from New England who volunteered for U.S. Navy service after Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7, 1941). He becomes an officer assigned to a technological spy unit, focusing on a covert battle for atomic bomb secrets. Tim's harrowing adventures take him from a torpedo attack off the African coast, through a slave trading ring in Mauretania, to the radioactive mines of the Belgian Congo. After meeting some of the top U.S. intel chiefs, like Wild Bill Donovan of O.S.S., he is assigned to another covert operation in London, U.K. during the Blitz. There, he plays a dangerous game of shadowing with a Soviet agent (code name: Jaguar) whose mission includes killing Nordhall.

In that time frame, a true incident occurs: Hitler sent the U-245 (submarine) to take atomic bomb secrets and radioactive cores to Japan, knowing the Third Reich was doomed, and hoping that the Japanese could carry on the war by atom-bombing U.S. cities. The submarine, in real life, was intercepted by U.S. Navy elements, and the cargo taken to Porstmouth, N.H. From there, according to this story, the material was transported west for use in the development of atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

Tim Nordhall, reassigned by the U.S. Navy to a San Francisco intelligence unit, manages to help intercept the stolen atom bomb material from under the noses of Stalin's spies, who were everywhere in the USA at the time. Tim (amid rousing and passionate amatory adventures, including having two wives) manages to elude the Soviet dictator's spies.

Stalin, who has a personal hate vendetta against Tim Nordhall for stealing back the U-234 atom bomb material, learns that Tim Nordhall and a certain Allied female had a little girl (Marianne) and this little girl was taken to Siberia by her mother to escape Stalin... but Jaguar and other Stalinist spies use the Siberian Girl (Umnitsa, 'good and clever girl,' a previous title of this novel) to try and trap Tim Nordhall.

Amid all that complex background, Marianne eventually circles the globe ("the world is round") and learns all the hidden secrets. As she does so, she traces her father's movements during World War Two, after which he vanishes from history. But he is not dead; and she will be reunited with him.

Marianne is by now a middle-aged woman, whose youthful husband (a reckless playboy in European glamor circles) has died in a racing car incident. Marianne is trying to put the pieces of her life together, starting with her personal history (material for another novel maybe).

And NOTE: this is one of my novels (like On Saint Ronan Street and Paris Affaire) that begins at the ending and loops around to end at the beginning. There is another special meaning to the logo "The World Is Round:" At the point of final realization, a middle-aged Marianne Didier stands on a beach near San Francisco, CA and stares west across the dark, night-time Pacific Ocean... and remembers how, as a tiny little girl, barely four years old, she stood on a similar beach in Siberia, looking east (toward her future self) wondering... because her mother, who died soon afterward, told her about her wonderful father, and the magnificent land across the sea called United States, of which she was born a citizen…

Can't Stop Reading… This is one of my novels about which readers have told me (a) "I could not stop reading; it was fascinating;" (b) "I hope they make the movie, because I could visualize it in my head every step along the way;" (c) "I want to read your next one." I hope you will feel the same way. [JTC]

Titles Over The Years. Some of my novels write themselves in a few days (honest) or weeks. This is one of those that took years to develop. It started out rather lightly as a World War Two story in San Francisco, titled Intersect: Danger (pseud: Ann Cymba, which is Latin for skiff or boat; I just like the rhythm of the ancient word). It became Umnitsa, a Russian term meaning good or clever girl (Marianne). And among its later titles (trying for SEO etc) were The World Is Round: Memories of Love and War 1941-1991 which has kind of stuck as a good subtitle. I even toyed with Airport Novel, since it is a perfect fit for those who need a long, engaging, endless read to keep them busy on those interminable flights around the world. Bits of meaning from the various titles have stuck with the text, like 'the world is round' because of the toddler and her older version eyeballing each other across space and time. Hope you like it. [JTC]

ADDED: From Another Blurb: Spans half the world and half a century through World War Two and the Cold War. Marianne is in her early 40s as the Soviet Union collapses in 1991, when the frame of this novel opens with her sentimental and dangerous search for her lost parents. Among the figures she encounters are Jaguar, a Soviet era spy for Stalin, whose mission was to kill Tim Nordall; and now he wants to help her; a British spy master in Canterbury; and other historic figures. While Marianne's search frames the story, the core concerns Lt. Tim Nordall's dangerous, often deadly adventures during World War Two. That inner core saga includes his shipwreck off Africa, capture as a slave in Mali, escape with two Nazi deserters who fly him to the uranium fields in the Belgian Congo, and many more adventures in a complex global network of espionage. Walk-ons include Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon as a young U.S. Navy officer, a future CIA director, and many other historic figures. We also spend a few chapters in U-234 (true story), the last Nazi submarine to flee Hitler's collapsing Third Reich with a gift of radioactive material and modern jet airplane parts, heading to Japan to enable the Empire of the Rising Sun to atom-bomb U.S. cities. Luckily for us all, that sun was setting rather than rising…

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