In 1942, at the height of World War Two, the famous writer Ernest Hemingway sought permission from the U.S. government to operate a spy ring out of his house in the Cuban countryside. This much is true... It is the summer of `42, and FBI agent Joe Lucas has come to Cuba at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover to keep an eye on Ernest Hemingway. The great writer has assembled a ragtag spy ring that he calls the "Crook Factory" to play a dangerous game of amateur espionage. But then Lucas and Hemingway, against all the odds, uncover a critical piece of intelligence -- and the game turns deadly. In THE CROOK FACTORY, award-winning author Dan Simmons expands a little-known fact into a tour de force of gripping historical suspense set in the sensual Cuban landscape of the early 1940s.