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Rome 1953: A Jack Rourke Cold War Story
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerHistorical Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 23 2026
Pages: 202
Weight: 0.61
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A Jack Rourke Cold War Novel
By Alan Thederahn
In Rome, secrets don't die. They wait.
Rome, 1953.
The war is over-but its shadows still rule the Eternal City. Beneath the Vatican's marble corridors, along the cafés of the Tiber, and in the ancient streets where East and West trade whispers for blood, the Cold War is already burning.
Jack Rourke once served as an American diplomat. Then as a spy. Now he's a man haunted by a woman he failed to save-and a daughter he abandoned to survive. Returning to Rome was never part of the plan.
Then a Vatican archivist is found dead, clutching a coded page from a long-buried wartime dossier. And Jack is pulled back into the world he swore he'd left behind.
His allies are as dangerous as his enemies:
Isabella Conti, a brilliant Italian scholar whose past may be as lethal as the secrets she protects.
Céleste Rourke, his estranged French-American daughter-furious, fearless, and far more capable than Jack wants to admit.
Vittorio Mancini, an aging partisan who survived the Resistance and still believes knives tell fewer lies than men.
Waiting for them is their adversary:
Major Yuri Talanov, the new KGB rezident in Rome-a patient, methodical killer who studies men the way others study scripture.
From the catacombs beneath the Appian Way to the burning glassworks of Murano, Jack races to uncover Operation Ravenna-a ledger of wartime sins powerful enough to shatter alliances and ignite a second war if exposed.
But the closer Jack comes to the truth, the more dangerous it becomes.
Because some secrets were never meant to be uncovered.
Some sins demand blood.
And in a city where every stone remembers, Jack Rourke must confront not only the assassins hunting him...
...but the ghosts that have followed him since France.
Cold War Rome is Book I in the Jack Rourke Spy Cycle-a gripping historical thriller of espionage, betrayal, and moral reckoning, in the tradition of The Quiet American and le Carré.
History casts long shadows.
Step inside one.
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