A fun, fantastical adventure in historical revisionism.
Marcellus’ (Jubal’s Gold, 2014, etc.) thriller considers the possibility that Hitler did not, in fact, commit suicide.
The story opens on Oct. 5, 2014, with Paul Keasler, a 93-year-old German, admiring his secret stash of Nazi memorabilia. It’s quickly revealed that Keasler’s true identity is Otto Beck, a former Nazi still faithful to Hitler. He began a journal in 1945, right after he was assigned to work closely with Hitler on a special project. While Keasler thumbs through the book, an assassin breaks into his home and kills him. That assassin belongs to a secret organization called Nakam (the Hebrew word for vengeance) devoted to hunting down Nazis who escaped Germany—and punishment—at the end of World War II. FBI Special Agent Frazier is assigned to the case and recruits the help of professor Michael Grayson, an expert on all things Nazi. With the help of Angela Brown, a young woman raised by Keasler but unaware of his nefarious background, Grayson tries to piece together the puzzle of the murder and its broader, historical implications. Alongside the narrative are excerpts from Beck’s journal, which discloses a plot to fake Hitler’s death before being trapped by invading Russians. Interestingly, Grayson always suspected this was true, but he lacked sufficient evidence to prove it. Now that they’re in possession of the journal—Keasler had put it back into a hidden drawer before his demise—Grayson and Angela are zealously pursued by Nakam vigilantes, who have a deadly agenda of their own. Flashes of violence punctuate the briskly paced action; however, while readers will never want for clarity, dialogue can be stiff, even halting: “ ‘I don’t like this,’ he whispered. ‘Just walk, don’t run anymore and act normal.’ ‘Normal? I don’t know what that is anymore!’ she replied.” The novel revolves around an outlandish historical hypothesis—what if Hitler got away and still lives?—but sometimes that outlandishness pushes the envelope even further: might there be a treasure map in that journal? As such, the plot aims for—and hits—entertainment rather than stark realism.
A fun, fantastical adventure in historical revisionism.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
