A Single Spy, Christie - B

                                              Seldom does a WWII spy novel start on the Azerbaijan-Iranian border in 1936 and feature as its protagonist a seventeen-year-old Russian orphan. Alexsi Smirnov has escaped from a state orphanage and has developed some serious fighting and thieving skills,working with the Shahskavan smugglers deep in the south of the USSR. He is so good that he comes to the attention of the NKVD and is sent to Moscow for  a brief recruitment and training.  Because he had lived for a while with a German family and is unusually good with languages, he is set up as a sleeper agent with a German official, who believes he is a long-lost nephew. He of course winds up in the Abwehr, sees the plans for Barbarossa, and twice transmits information about the invasion. He is not believed either time. He is then assigned to Tehran, back to Berlin and to Tehran for a second time. The novel stumbles at the end when he is involved in trying to stop an oft-rumored attempt to assassinate Churchill at the Tehran Conference.  This is a very creative book and one that effectively points out the perfidious nature of Stalin's regime.