Under Fire for Servia

It's 1914, and seventeen-year-old Dick Warner has crossed an ocean with nothing but his father's old pocket watch and a name: Mike Hallo, the man who swindled his family and left them with nothing. Now Dick stands in the border town of Semlin, where the Danube marks the line between empire and rebellion, and war is just a spark away from catching. What begins as one boy's quest for justice becomes something larger. As Dick hunts Hallo through a town teeming with spies and secret police, he finds an unlikely ally in Stepan Dushan, a Serbian boy whose family knows every hidden route through the Balkans. Together, the two forge a friendship that transcends language and nationality, even as the drums of war grow louder and the Austro-Hungarian army masses at the border. The personal and the political collide in this rousing adventure, written in 1915 when the war it depicts was still unfolding.