The Warsaw Cipher

Poland, 1942. A sealed letter arrives from Paris. Inside is a love confession - and a cipher that could destroy everything.

Marta Kowalski has survived two years as a nurse and resistance courier in a Nazi work camp outside Warsaw by following three rules: stay consistent, know only what you must, and never let anything show. She has kept to these rules without exception.

Then a letter arrives through the resistance network, addressed to her by first name only, in a handwriting she recognised before she finished opening the envelope. It belongs to Miriam - a woman she loved in Vienna in 1929, a woman she believed was dead, a woman she has mourned without a body or a confirmation for eleven years.

The first page is a love letter. The second is a cipher they built together as a game in 1930, now carrying the most dangerous intelligence Marta has ever received: the name of a Gestapo officer operating inside her own camp under Wehrmacht cover, and a list of twelve resistance members he has already betrayed.

Decoding the cipher is the easy part. What follows - the investigation, the informant, the records room, the decisions made against orders - will test every rule Marta has built her survival on.

The Warsaw Cipher is the second novel in The Unbroken Thread, a sweeping four-part series following women across occupied Europe, each holding one piece of a story that will not be complete until a generation later. It is a novel about the cost of knowing, the weight of trust, and the extraordinary courage of a woman who does the right thing in conditions designed to make the right thing impossible.

For readers of Kristin Hannah, Kate Quinn, and Heather Morris.




Also in The Unbroken Thread series:
Book One: The Paris Silence
Book Three: The Amsterdam Promise - Coming Soon
Book Four: The Last Letter Home - Coming Soon