ASHLEY SHOEBROOK
FATE OF ANGELS was inspired by a family connection to a little-known chapter in World War II history. My wife’s grandmother was twenty-three years old when her travels through Europe in the summer of 1939 were interrupted by the unthinkable. Her harrowing ordeal aboard S.S. Athenia the night it was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-Boat is the central event around which this novel is constructed. Set in Budapest, London, Southampton, Glasgow, and the icy waters of the North Atlantic, FATE OF ANGELS explores two questions that have puzzled historians for generations: Why was Germany’s first target in World War II a civilian passenger liner? And why, for the duration of the war—and for many years afterward—did Germany refuse to take responsibility for this war crime?
For twenty-three-year-old Catherine Rose McLean and her kid sister, Louisa, the threat of another war in Europe means cutting short their grand tour of the continent and finding safe passage back to America. But when Max Vahle, a handsome agent of the German resistance, approaches Catherine in a Budapest nightclub and entrusts her with a frame of top-secret microfilm, she becomes the target of Nazi spies who will stop at nothing to safeguard Hitler's darkest secret. One of these spies—a conflicted deep-cover agent called Vera Dreyfus—is ordered to infiltrate Catherine's touring group and acquire the film using ‘all necessary force.' When Catherine and Louisa book passage out of Glasgow on the ill-fated Athenia, Vera has no choice but to follow them aboard. But within hours of Britain declaring war on Germany, Athenia is caught in the crosshairs of history by a U-boat hellbent on sinking her. When the first torpedo strikes, what begins as an epic struggle for survival in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic culminates in a shocking and deadly confrontation.