Old pro Thayer (White Star, 1995, etc.) delivers a fast-moving and entertaining (if fanciful) account of how Hitler met his end toward the close of WW II. Concerned that Hitler might be able to prolong an almost-over conflict from an Alpine redoubt, FDR directs the OSS to liquidate the Nazi leader. Shortly thereafter, a hardcase US Ranger named Jack Cray is incarcerated in Colditz Castle, the Wehrmacht gasthaus for flight-minded POWs. After several false starts in the spring of 1945, bilingual Jack stages a spectacular escape from the Saxony stronghold and makes his violent way across a war-torn countryside toward Berlin. An alarmed Reich Security Service frees Otto Dietrich (a virtuoso detective unjustly imprisoned by the Gestapo) to track down the one-man wrecking crew before he can complete his unknown—but predictable—mission. Once in the bombed-out capital city, Jack (who blames himself for the death of his young wife in an auto accident) joins forces with resistance operative Katrin von Tornitz, the pretty and vengeance-minded widow of an Army officer executed for complicity in a plot to assassinate Hitler. At no small cost in angst and blood, the two manage to stay one step ahead of Dietrich, who comes to admire the hired gun's resilience and resourcefulness, while death-wish Jack ascertains that his target is holed up in an underground bunker. With help from a disaffected technician who'll do anything to gain the release of his only surviving son from the Soviets, Jack sabotages the subterranean bastion's ventilation system. In the hellish confusion that ensues, the intrepid hit man breaks in on a defenseless Hitler. Before he can make it back behind his own lines, however, Jack must reach a rapprochement with the dogged Dietrich and the aristocratic von Tornitz, both of whom remain true to the Fatherland—in their fashion. A slick period-piece in the estimable tradition of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male.
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80025-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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