The Nazis have crashed through the Arden Forest andhave attacked France.  In the heat of battle, a young French woman, Madeleine Toche races to the front to find her twin brother, wounded in battle.  When he dies in her arms and she must return his body to her family home in Southern France, her world is shattered.

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Once home and her brother buried, Madeleine and her parents try to live their lives under German occupation.  She finds her way into the French Resistance helping young Jewish children escape from the SS and Gestapo.  When she is discovered and raped by a Nazi officer, she vows revenge.  With her father’s help, she kills her rapist and escapes by sea to Spain, bound for England.

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Madeleine makes it to London and is recruited by the British Special Operations Executive, Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s Army of the Shadows.  At the peak of her training, it takes a deadly twist when she is singled out to train to be an assassin.  Her teacher, Berthold Hartmann, Germany’s super-spy from World War I is now outcast as a Jew.  When his family is taken and interned, he focuses his rage at the new German leadership, killing Nazis with impunity.  Together, Madeleine and Hartmann unleash a wave of terror on the enemy elite.

"Overall, this heroine belongs on the big screen."

The New York Journal of Books

"Cold Lonely Courage is an absolutely gripping and brilliant recapture of the darkest realities of World War II."

Stephen Boehrer, Author

The Purple Culture, National Best Books 2009 Award- Winner

"Cold Lonely Courage is fine storytelling and people you care about will suck you in from page one and glue you to the book through to its climactic ending."

James Thompson, Author

The celebrated Inspector Vaara series

Soren Petrek is a practicing criminal trial attorney, admitted to the Minnesota Bar in 1991.  Married with two adult children, Soren continues to live and work in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Educated in the U.S., England and France, Soren sat his O-level examinations at the Heathland School in Hounslow, London in 1981.  His undergraduate degree in Forestry is from the University of Minnesota, 1986.  His law degree is from William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota (1991).

Soren’s novel, Cold Lonely Courage won Fade In Magazine’s 2009 Award for Fiction.  Fade In was voted the nation’s favorite movie magazine by the Washington Post and the L.A. Times in 2011 and 2012.

The French edition of Cold Lonely Courage (titled simply, Courage) was published January 2019, by Encre Rouge Editions, distributed by Hachette Livre in 60 countries.  Soren’s contemporary novel,Tim will be released along with the rest of the books in the Madeleine Toche series of historical thrillers.

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Tuck Magazine has published several of Soren’s poems, some of which have been included in Soren’s book of poetry, A Search for Solid Ground. 

Encre

rouge

publishers

"This is a book that cries out to be read and once opened you will suffer withdrawal when you set it aside... A MUST ADDITION TO YOUR KINDLE LIBRARY!"

By Deborah Franko

"This was such an astoundingly good book, I stayed up until 2 am to read it all. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes reading about our history in the dark days of WWII."

By Patti Jane

coming

april

2019

The Allies and the Nazis are in a deadly race to develop the ultimate weapon while supersonic V-2 rockets rain down on London.  Madeleine Toche and Berthold Hartmann, the German super assassin who taught her to kill, search for the secret factory where Werner von Braun and his Gestapos masters use slave labor to build the weapons as the bodies of the innocent pile up.  The Allied ground forces push towards Berlin while the German SS fight savagely for each inch of ground.

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Finding the factory hidden beneath Mount Kohnstein, Hartmann contacts his old enemy, Winston Churchill and summons Madeleine to his side.  While she moves to bring the mountain down on her enemies, Hartmann leads a daring escape from the dreaded Dora concentration camp to continue his revenge against the monsters who ruined his beloved Germany.

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Together with the Russian Nachtlexen, the Night Witches, fearsome female pilots the race tightens as the United States and the Germans successfully carry out an atomic bomb test.

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Germany installs an atom bomb in a V-2 pointed towards London, while the US delivers one to a forward base in the Pacific.  The fate of the Second World War and the future of mankind hangs in the balance.