John Altman's first novel, "A Gathering of Spies" is a convincing debut. He uses ideas that have been used many times before: the "atomic secret" at Los Almos; the secret of the point of landing for D-Day; a long hidden and extremely well training (and feminine) mole; and historical facts such as Einstein's letter to Roosevelt. This book is different because his craft so well. It is a thriller that thrills; one of the protagonists (Katarina) does the incredible, but we believe it. An aspect of this novel that I truly like is that Altman protrays a character who does horrible things, but, oddly, I come to somehow like her and hope, against all hope, that things work out well for her in the end. But I shall not divulge the ending.