The Typist of Genoa

In 1946, the Nazis fleeing Europe needed one thing: a Red Cross travel document. Chiara Lombardi typed them.

Inspired by the real escape routes that carried Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele out of Genoa.

Chiara was twenty-one when she watched an SS officer massacre her village, her family among them. She never saw his face. She saw only the burn scar on the back of his right hand, resting on his holster.

Now she sits behind the stamp at the Red Cross office on the Genoa waterfront, rolling the thumbs of refugees bound for South America. Some are survivors. Some are the men who made them survivors. Chiara can't stop them, so she starts keeping secret files in a code only she can read. Then a Jewish Brigade hunter learns what her marks mean, an American intelligence officer wants her as his informant, and a desperately ill little girl needs a berth on a ship.

And one morning, across her desk, a man holds out a scarred right hand.

Eighty years later, disgraced genealogist Jess Navarro is hired to confirm a powerful political family's roots. Days after she delivers her report, her client is found dead below his terrace. He has left her a photograph of one of Chiara's coded files, and a secret someone will do anything to bury.

From the alleys of postwar Genoa to the streets of Buenos Aires, The Typist of Genoa is a gripping dual-timeline novel of resistance, revenge and the price of justice, for readers who love WWII stories of women who fought back.