The Losing Role: A Novel

A German actor tries to escape a doomed secret mission.

In the last winter of WWII a failed German actor, Max Kaspar, is forced to join an absurdly desperate secret mission in which he must impersonate an enemy American officer. So Max cooks up his own fanatical plan -- he'll use his false identity to escape tyranny and war and flee to the America he'd once abandoned.

The Losing Role is based on an actual false flag operation during 1944's Battle of the Bulge that's been made infamous in legend but in reality was a doomed farce. In all the tragic details and with some dark humor, this is the story of an aspiring talent who got in over his head and tried to break free.

The Losing Role is the prequel to Liberated: A Novel of Germany, 1945 -- Max Kaspar is the older brother of German-American US Army captain Harry Kaspar in Liberated. The third novel in the series, Lost Kin, reunites the estranged Kaspar brothers in 1946 Munich.