"Intricate plotting, sly humor, sudden violence: this spy novel has it all..." Tom Worrell, Yale Record editor 1968 was in the middle of the cold war. It was a time when Washington was still pretty much a small southern city, Pan Am and TWA were the dominant airlines, and in most places in Europe you had to go to a Post and Telegraph Office to book a telephone call if you didn't have a home or office phone, which most people didn't. Into this milieu comes Sam Carpenter, ex Marine Corps and now a junior CIA officer. Hungry for action, he finds himself, his wife (who looks a lot like Jackie Kennedy) and three year old twins in Luxembourg, a lovely old city which holds no interest for the CIA and KGB . For Sam had gotten crosswise with the CIA bureaucracy and has gotten himself exiled. But in nearby Germany the CIA Station needs bodies for its surveillance team. And so one thing leads to another until Sam is right in the middle of high level intelligence operations, assassinations, and a series of intricate double crosses in Luxembourg, Bonn, Frankfurt and, of course, Washington D.C.. ..".plenty of action, an evocative flashback to the 1960s, likeable good guys and believable bad guys..." Richard Sippel ..".The 2nd Lieutenant Spy is the real thing."John Goshko, Washington Post reporter