Waiting for Sunrise

This "thoroughly entertaining" historical novel has "the pace of a spy thriller, with code-cracking and double-crossing aplenty" (The New Yorker).Vienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor in town seeking psychotherapy for a troubling ailment, becomes caught up in a feverish affair with a beautiful, enigmatic woman. When she goes to the police to press charges of rape, however, he is mystified, and his few months of passion come to an abrupt end. Only a carefully plotted escape—with the help of two mysterious British diplomats—saves him from trial. But the frenzied getaway sets off a chain of events that steadily dismantles Lysander''s life as he knows it. He returns to London hoping to win back his one-time fiancée and banish from memory his traumatic ordeals abroad, but Vienna haunts him at every turn. The men who helped coordinate his escape recruit him to carry out the brutal murder of a complete stranger. His lover from Vienna shows up nonchalantly at a party, ready to