Watcher in the Shadows
After an assassination attempt, an ex-spy must run for his life
As far as the police are concerned, Charles Dennim is a zoologist, and there is no reason anyone would want to kill him. And yet, one afternoon when Dennim is working at his desk, death knocks at his door. It is the postman, and he has a package slightly too large to fit through the mail slot. He tries to force it—and triggers the bomb that lies within. When Dennim emerges from the smoking ruin of his doorway, he sees the innocent postman, ripped in half on his front stoop. The police are baffled, but Dennim is not—for he was once a spy.
This mild-mannered scientist spent World War II embedded deep in Nazi Germany, feeding secrets back to Great Britain. He buried that side of himself long ago, but a nameless killer has decided to dig it back up. To survive, Dennim must remember what it means to be a spy.
Geoffrey Household
Geoffrey Household (1900–1988) was born in England. In 1922 he earned a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from the University of Oxford. After graduation, he worked at a bank in Romania before moving to Spain in 1926 and selling bananas as a marketing manager for the United Fruit Company.
In 1929 Household moved to the United States, where he wrote children’s encyclopedia content and children’s radio plays for CBS. From 1933 to 1939, he traveled internationally as a printer’s-ink sales rep. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer for the British army, with posts in Romania, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, and Persia. After the war, he returned to England and wrote full time until his death. He married twice, the second time in 1942 to Ilona Zsoldos-Gutmán, with whom he had three children, a son and two daughters.
Household began writing in the 1920s and sold his first story to the Atlantic Monthly in 1936. His first novel, The Terror of Villadonga, was published during the same year. His first short story collection, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories, appeared in 1938. Altogether, Household wrote twenty-eight novels, including four for young adults; seven short story collections; and a volume of autobiography, Against the Wind (1958). Most of his novels are thrillers, and he is best known for Rogue Male (1939), which was filmed as Man Hunt in 1941 and as a TV movie under the novel’s original title in 1976.
