The award-winning team of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev are back with Checkmate, the sequel to the hit 2019 Event Leviathan mystery that upended the DC Universe! Leviathan has agents and acolytes all over the world-but what is the secret behind its power? The planet’s last, best hope to infiltrate Leviathan may be a motley collection of spymasters-Green Arrow, the Question, Talia al Ghul, and other unlikely allies converge to tackle Leviathan as members of the new Checkmate-but who is the surprise hero behind this team? Big clues to the future of the DC Universe start here! This volume collects Checkmate #1-6 and Leviathan Dawn #1.

The shocking finale to the DC spy event of the year. Everything is revealed…and only one will survive the showdown between Checkmate and Leviathan. Also, who is the Daemon Rose, and why does he have a gun pointed at Superman’s face? Plus: Mr. King’s identity revealed, as well as the reason he has sacrificed everything to bring Checkmate back!

Leviathan has arrived. They have followers and agents all over the globe. What is the secret behind Leviathan’s power? The all-new…Checkmate! A collection of the most dangerous spymasters must team up to take back the world. Who is the secret hero behind Checkmate?! Guest-starring Superman!

A PopSugar Best Book of the Year! Readers of Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz and watchers of The Queen’s Gambit won’t want to miss this amazing debut set during World War II. A young Polish resistance worker, imprisoned in Auschwitz as a political prisoner, plays chess in exchange for her life, and in doing so fights to bring the man who destroyed her family to justice. Maria Florkowska is many things: daughter, avid chess player, and, as a member of the Polish underground resistance in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, a young woman brave beyond her years. Captured by the Gestapo, she is imprisoned in Auschwitz, but while her family is sent to their deaths, she is spared. Realizing her ability to play chess, the sadistic camp deputy, Karl Fritzsch, decides to use her as a chess opponent to entertain the camp guards. However, once he tires of exploiting her skills, he has every intention of killing her. Befriended by a Catholic priest, Maria attempts to overcome her grief, vows to avenge the murder of her family, and plays for her life. For four grueling years, her strategy is simple: Live. Fight. Survive. By cleverly provoking Fritzsch’s volatile nature in front of his superiors, Maria intends to orchestrate his downfall. Only then will she have a chance to evade the fate awaiting her and see him punished for his wickedness. As she carries out her plan and the war nears its end, she challenges her former nemesis to one final game, certain to end in life or death, in failure or justice. If Maria can bear to face Fritzsch—and her past—one last time.

"After the explosive events of INFINITE CRISIS and THE OMAC PROJECT, the U.N. formed Checkmate to bring down heroes and villains that get out of line. Using their unique abilities to deputize human and metahuman forces, this agency pulls out all the stops in pursuit of its goal to maintain balance between worlds. Having finally secured the political backing they needed to survive, Checkmate's operations begin in earnest, as an agent tries to infiltrate the terrorist group Kobra! But someone within Checkmate seems to be working against them, and a compromised agent is forced to make a deadly, life-changing choice!"--

From a master of popular history, the lively, immersive story of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II as it’s never been told before BERLIN’S FATE WAS SEALED AT THE 1945 YALTA CONFERENCE: the city, along with the rest of Germany, was to be carved up among the victorious powers— the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. On paper, it seemed a pragmatic solution. In reality, once the four powers were no longer united by the common purpose of defeating Germany, they wasted little time reverting to their prewar hostility toward—and suspicion of—one another. The veneer of civility between the Western allies and the Soviets was to break down in spectacular fashion in Berlin. Rival systems, rival ideologies, and rival personalities ensured that the German capital became an explosive battleground. The warring leaders who ran Berlin’s four sectors were charismatic, mercurial men, and Giles Milton brings them all to rich and thrilling life here. We meet unforgettable individuals like America’s explosive Frank “Howlin’ Mad” Howley, a brusque sharp-tongued colonel with a relish for mischief and a loathing for all Russians. Appointed commandant of the city’s American sector, Howley fought an intensely personal battle against his wily nemesis, General Alexander Kotikov, commandant of the Soviet sector. Kotikov oozed charm as he proposed vodka toasts at his alcohol-fueled parties, but Howley correctly suspected his Soviet rival was Stalin’s agent, appointed to evict the Western allies from Berlin and ultimately from Germany as well. Throughout, Checkmate in Berlin recounts the first battle of the Cold War as we’ve never before seen it. An exhilarating tale of intense rivalry and raw power, it is above all a story of flawed individuals who were determined to win, and Milton does a masterful job of weaving between all the key players’ motivations and thinking at every turn. A story of unprecedented human drama, it’s one that had a profound, and often underestimated, shaping force on the modern world – one that’s still felt today.