THE REUNION

A historical footnote from WWII provides a jumping-off point for this fiction debut. In 1942, a German U-boat crashed off the shore of North Carolina, and its surviving crew members spent the rest of the war in an internment camp in Oklahoma. Six decades later, the nine German-born survivors of U-352 plan a reunion. Occasional flashbacks flesh out the time leading up to the 1942 explosion. Back in the present, an antisocial misfit named Joey DeMichael has decided for reasons unstated (save a vociferous hatred of old people) to kill the crew by planting a bomb at the reunion site. Joey’s activities inadvertently attract the notice of young Carolyn Baker, a single mother on a cross-country quest for her birth parents with her toddler son Kenny in tow. Poring over stacks of old records, she finds coded evidence relating to the crash and perhaps the crime-to-be. But she can’t get the FBI’s ear until she and handsome agent Martin Dunlevy meet cute. Dunlevy juggles the unraveling of the cryptic messages with the pursuit of Joey and the protection of Kenny and Carolyn—with whom, of course, he’s falling in love—from the likes of a crafty veteran senator named DaSilva and his slick, ambitious protégé Manny Vocatura, heir to a supermarket dynasty ruled by a failing matriarch.

Autry writes with clarity and commendable attention to detail, but little sense of character or pace. Uninteresting plot threads converge very late in the story, after all but U-boat fanatics have likely bailed out.