David L. Robbins Books In Order

War of the Rats

Stalingrad, August 1942 the brutal siege of the city begins. For six months, Stalingrad is the center of a titanic struggle between the Russian and German armies, the bloodiest campaign in mankind’s long history of warfare. The outcome is pivotal. If Hitler’s forces are not stopped, Russia will fall. And with it, the world. With razor sharp prose and brilliant historical accuracy, David L. Robbins brings the reader right into the thick of this monumental battle, in a novel so authentic, it could almost be true…
. German soldiers call the battle Rattenkrieg, War of the Rats. The combat is horrific, as victories are measured in meters and soldiers die in the smoking cellars and trenches of a ruined city. Through this twisted carnage stalk two men one Russian, one German each the top sniper in their respective armies. These two marksmen are equally matched in both skill and tenacity. And each has his own mission…
. The young Russian sniper’s credo of ‘one man, one bullet’ has established his reputation as the Red army’s top long distance assassin. Nicknamed the Hare, he’s been put in charge of an impromptu sniper school, training both men and women to kill with chilling precision. To counter this threat, the Headmaster, leader of the Na*zis’ elite sniper school, is flown to Stalingrad. Each has been given similar orders to find and kill his counterpart. And the extraordinary duel begins…
. Complicating matters is an American woman, Tania Chernova, trapped in Russia at the start of the war, who has come to Stalingrad from the Russian resistance. Seeking vengeance against the German army, the defiant American joins the Hare’s team of snipers, becoming one of his most talented assassins and possibly his greatest weakness. An electrifying novel based on a true story, this is the harrowing tale of two adversaries who will know each other intimately by the climax of their own private war; two soldiers whose story is the saga of Stalingrad itself and whose fortunes will help decide the fate of a world at war. Fast paced and explosive, War of the Rats is a stunning amalgam of deepest history and thrilling fiction.

The End of War

Berlin, January 1945. The war draws to a close, but the fight for a vanquished city and for history is just beginning. In the final months of the war in Europe, the last act of a five year conflagration is about to be played out. As Allied generals surround the mortally wounded Na*zi military machine, strategies are being formed on a greater scale than even generals can imagine. While Churchill fumes helplessly, Roosevelt makes crucial decisions that will cede Berlin to Stalin and the Russians. The stakes are no less critical for ordinary men and women, fighting to live another day…
. From the chaos of the eastern front, to the desperation of a single Jewish man hidden in a Berlin baseme*nt, to the burning ambition of an American photojournalist, Robbins animates the giants who shaped history and breathes life into the heartbreaking struggles of those who merely lived it.

Last Citadel

One nation taking a desperate gamble of war.
Another fighting for survival.

Two armies locked in a bloody cataclysm that will decide history…

David L. Robbins has won widespread acclaim for his powerful and splendidly researched novels of World War II. Now he casts his brilliant vision on one of the most terrifying and most crucial battles of the war: the Battle of Kursk, Hitler’s desperate gamble to defeat Russia, in the final German offensive on the eastern front.

Last Citadel

Spring 1943. In the west, Germany strengthens its choke hold on France. To the south, an Allied invasion looms imminent. But the greatest threat to Hitler s dream of a Thousand Year Reich lies east, where his forces are pitted in a death match with a Russian enemy willing to pay any price to defend the motherland. Hitler rolls the dice, hurling his best SS forces and his fearsome new weapon, the Mark VI Tiger tank, in a last ditch summer offensive, code named Citadel.

The Red Army around Kursk is a sprawling array of infantry, armor, fighter planes, and bombers. Among them is an intrepid group of women flying antiquated biplanes; they swoop over the Germans in the dark, earning their nickname, Night Witches. On the ground, Private Dimitri Berko gallops his tank, the Red Army s lithe little T 34, like a Cossack steed. In the turret above Dimitri rides his son, Valya, a Communist sergeant who issues his father orders while the war widens the gulf between them. In the skies, Dimitri s daughter, Katya, flies with the Night Witches, until she joins a ferocious band of partisans in the forests around Kursk. Like Russia itself, the Berko family is suffering the fury and devastation of history s most titanic tank battle while fighting to preserve what is sacred their land, their lives, and each other as Hitler flings against them his most potent armed force.

Inexorable and devastating, a company of Mark VI Tiger tanks is commanded by one extraordinary SS officer, a Spaniard known as la Daga, the Dagger. He d suffered a terrible wound at the hands of the Russians: now he has returned with a cold fury to exact his revenge. And above it all, one quiet man makes his own plan to bring Citadel crashing down and reshape the fate of the world.

A remarkable story of men and arms, loyalty and betrayal, Last Citadel propels us into the claustrophobic confines of a tank in combat, into the tension of guerrilla tactics, and across the smoking charnel of one of history s greatest battlefields. Panoramic, authentic, and unforgettable, it reverberates long after the last cannon sounds.

From the Hardcover edition.

Liberation Road

With his acclaimed novels of World War II, David L. Robbins awakened a generation to the drama, tragedy, and heroism of some of history’s greatest battles. Now he delivers a gripping and authentic story set against one of our greatest wartime achievements: the Red Ball Express, six thousand trucks and twenty three thousand men most of them African American who forged a lifeline of supplies in the Allied struggle to liberate France.

June 1944. The Allies deliver a staggering blow to Hitler s Atlantic fortress, leaving the beaches and bluffs of Normandy strewn with corpses. The Germans have only one chance to stop the immense invasion by bottling up the Americans on the Cotentin Peninsula. There, in fields crisscrossed with dense hedgerows, many will meet their death while others will search for signs of life. Among the latter are two very different men, each with his own demons to fight and his own reasons to risk his life for his fellow man.

Joe Amos Biggs is an invisible colored driver in the Red Ball Express, the unheralded convoy of trucks that serves as a precious lifeline to the front. Delivering fuel and ammunition to men whose survival depends on the truckers, Joe Amos finds himself hungering to make his mark and propelled into battle among those who don t see him as an equal but will need him to be a hero.

A chaplain in the demoralized 90th Infantry, Rabbi Ben Kahn is a veteran of the first great war and old enough to be the father of the GIs he tends. Searching for the truth about his own son, a downed pilot missing in action, Kahn finds himself dueling with God, wading into combat without a gun, and becoming a leader among men in need of someone anyone to follow.

The prize: the liberation of Paris, where a ruthless American traitor known as Chien Blanc White Dog grows fat and rich in the black market. Whatever the occupied city s destiny, destroyed or freed, he will win.

The fates of these three men will collide, hurtling toward an uncommon destiny in which people commit deeds they cannot foresee and can never truly explain.

From the screams of German . 88 howitzers to the last whispers of dying young soldiers, Robbins captures war in all its awful fullness. And through the eyes of his unique characters, he leaves us with a mature, brilliant, and memorable vision of humanity in the face of inhumanity itself.

From the Hardcover edition.

Broken Jewel

New York Times bestselling author David Robbins, the Homer of World War II Kirkus Reviews, catapults readers into a daring wartime rescue in this unforgettable new novel Locked in the notorious Los Ba os Internment Camp southeast of Manila, Remy Tuck, his headstrong nineteen year old son Talbot, and their community of Allied internees battle starvation and sad*istic punishments by the Imperial Japanese Army. Defying the guards at every turn, Tal watches beautiful Carmen through the window of her room above the camp, where she is trapped in her own prison, a sex slave for the Japanese army. Without speaking, they fall in love. As the tide of the war in the Pacific turns against their captors, the camp grows even more dangerous, and Remy and Tal enact a courageous plan to save their fellow prisoners and the woman Tal loves from certain execution.

The Assassins Gallery

New Year’s Eve, 1945. The assassin steps out of the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a raging nor easter. Cool and efficient, she s a weapon of war superbly trained in the ancient arts of subterfuge and murder. And even though she s outnumbered, she s got one major advantage: No one knows she s coming.

Professor Mikhal Lammeck s specialty is the history and weaponry of assassins. But even Lammeck is caught off guard when the Secret Service urgently requests his help: A gruesome double murder and suicide in Massachusetts has set off alarm bells. It s only a hunch, but all too soon Lammeck suspects the unthinkable.

In the waning days of the war, someone wants one last shot to alter history. An assassin is headed to Washington, D.C., to kill the most important soldier of them all: the U.S. commander in chief. As Lammeck and a killer at the top of her profession circle the streets of the capital in the hunt for FDR, one of them will attempt to kill the world s most powerful man; the other, to save him. And between them, for an instant, history will hang in the balance…
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From the Hardcover edition.

The Betrayal Game

The breathtaking new thriller by suspense master David L. Robbins of a conspiracy so explosive, it could only be told as fiction. You know only half the story. Now the other half will blow you away.

Can one man make history and can another change it with a single bullet? It was a question that Professor Mikhal Lammeck had devoted his life to answering. An expert on history’s great political assassinations, he s come to Havana in the spring of 1961 to seek the answer firsthand. For the more he sees of Cuba s charismatic revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, the more he s convinced that he s witnessing that rarest anomaly: the man who can change history and who therefore must be murdered.

The wild CIA plots, the treacherous double crosses, the near miraculous escapes, are already legendary, but it seems as if Castro s number is finally up. With a massive U.S. backed invasion of the island looming, a trap has been set that not even Castro can escape. The players of this deadly assassination game are as varied as they are lethal organized crime figures, CIA agents, the Cuban underground, even a reclusive American billionaire. And now, perhaps most unlikely of all, a distinguished history professor.

Mikhal Lammeck is thrust dead center between a Cuban secret police captain and a chillingly amoral American CIA agent. It s a devil s bargain, one that Lammeck has no choice but to accept, and it will give him unprecedented access to the secret history of one of the twentieth century s greatest coups. Lammeck suddenly finds himself no longer only studying history, but making it. He soon becomes the unwilling mentor of a young man who s arrived in Cuba a confused marine sharpshooter determined to become the century s most infamous assassin.

Seamlessly blending history and fiction into an electrifying page turner, The Betrayal Game is that rarest of all thrillers a novel so vividly real, it might very well be true.

Scorched Earth

From David L. Robbins, bestselling author of The End of War and War of the Rats, comes a novel of searing intensity and uncompromising vision. Part mystery, part legal thriller, it is a story of crime and punishment set in a small southern town during one brutal, hot, and unforgiving summer that lays bare the potential of the human heart to hate and, ultimately, to heal. Scorched EarthThe inhabitants of Good Hope, Virginia, haven t felt the cooling effects of rain in weeks. The crops are withering. The ground is parched. There is no relief in sight. With the town a tinderbox waiting to explode, all it takes is a spark to ignite all the prejudice, the rage, and the secrets that are so carefully kept hidden. And then, in the midst of the terrible heat, a tragedy occurs. A baby is born and dies in her mother’s arms. The child, Nora Carol, is buried quickly and quietly the next day in a church graveyard. It should have ended right there but it didn t, for Nora Carol is of mixed race. The white deacons of Good Hope s Victory Baptist Church, trying to protect the centuries old traditions of their cemetery, have the body exhumed. That night the church is set ablaze, and the sole witness is the only suspect Elijah Waddell, Nora Carol s father. Nat Deeds, a former prosecutor and an exile of Good Hope, is pressed into service as Elijah s attorney. With a politically savvy prosecutor and a vindictive sheriff aligned against him, Nat knows it will be nearly impossible to get Elijah acquitted. But Elijah refuses to accept a plea. As the evidence mounts, Nat begins to suspect there is something his client isn t telling him, and the next revelation turns Good Hope into a powder keg: a body is found in the ashes of the church. Now Elijah is accused of murder, and the case is no longer a matter of winning or losing, but of life or death. The only way Nat can save his client is to scratch and claw for any shred of evidence, even if he has to bend the law to find it. As the summer heat intensifies and passions reach their boiling point, Nat must navigate through the incendiary secrets kept by friends and neighbors, by the guilty and the innocent, to an act of justice that has nothing to do with the law. From the Hardcover edition.