Fiona looked down at the rough chalk line she had drawn. A flash popped, blinding her for a second, giving her just enough time to throw him raw meat. She was not above a special kind of pandering.

—Warren Adler, from American Quartet

Biography of Warren Adler

Born in Brooklyn, Warren Adler (@WarrenAdler) Warren Adler is a product of the New York public school system. He graduated from PS91, Brooklyn Technical High School, and New York University, where he majored in English literature.

Inspired by his freshman English Professor Don Wolfe, Adler later went on to study creative writing with Dr. Wolfe when he taught at the New School. There he also studied under Dr. Charles Glicksberg. Among his classmates were Mario Puzo, William Styron, and many other talented writers. In 2009, Adler was the recipient of the “Alumni of the Year” Award at NYU’s College of Arts and Science.

After graduating from New York University with a degree in English literature, Adler worked for the New York Daily News before becoming Editor of the Queens Post, a prize winning weekly newspaper on Long Island. His column ‘Pepper on the Side’ became a staple at a number of newspapers in the country. During the Korean War, he served in the US Army in the Pentagon as the only Washington Correspondent for Armed Forces Press Service where his bylined stories went out weekly to all publications produced by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

Prior to his success as a novelist, Adler had a distinguished career as an entrepreneur. He has owned four radio stations and a TV station, founded and ran his own advertising and public relations agency in Washington, D.C.; his firm Warren Adler Ltd. was responsible for advertising and PR campaigns for political candidates, numerous businesses, and apartment and home communities. Among his clients was the Watergate complex, which Adler named himself. Adler was a consultant to the Nixon campaign in 1968 where his brief was the Jewish vote. He subsequently served as an advisor to the first Nixon administration. He closed his agency in 1974 after the publication of his first novel, Undertow, and has since, been devoted full-time to his writing career. Visit his website.

Why Worldreader loves Warren Adler

In the aftermath of the victorious end of WWII for the British and American, Stalin doesn’t hesitate to unleash his relentless and loyal Soviet Union across Eastern Europe with sights on the Western world – murdering, raping, and wreaking havoc along the way. Set weeks before Churchill’s historic Iron Curtain speech, Adler’s fictionalizes an assassination plot by an American Nazi mole we’re introduced to in the first chapters, Mr. Franz Mueller. His cheeky, upfront attitude hooks you right from the start, and as each character questions his peers’ loyalty, the web of suspicion submerges you in the uncertainties of each country’s military agenda at the time.

Adler transports us to the realities of the era, with cringe-worthy details from the depths of Winston Churchill’s depression spellsto the high-ranking Soviet assassination plans discussed over a few Lucky Strikes and the shockingly casual murder of 40 SS traitors captured in Soviet prisons. We love Warren Adler, and Target Churchill in particular, because of his brilliant combination of realistic fiction and historical accuracy that begs if each new plot twist really happened or not.

—Ava Mohsenin, Publishing Team, Worldreader San Francisco