A meticulously detailed spy story that delivers action, international intrigue, and seductive romance.
In Wiegmann’s novel, a spy sabotages Germany’s V2 rocket development in an attempt to save the Allies from a ghastly weapon of destruction.
Mathias Jansen is a young engineer working in Germany in the late 1930s. He is no fan of Hitler and the Nazis, so he’s recruited as a spy inside the Fatherland. His one assignment is to sabotage and thus slow the development of the V2 rocket, one of Hitler’s so-called wonder weapons. He is also in love with Marie Parisi, who has similar feelings for him and also hates the Nazis. Every story needs a good archvillain, and here it’s Walter Mayer, a memorably sadistic and ambitious Gestapo officer. Jansen speaks fluent German and is patriotic, brave, and as handsome as Marie is beautiful. After specialized training (guns, explosives, etc.) he is parachuted into occupied Poland along with a pallet of explosives and other equipment. His job is to find and destroy the factories that produce the various deadly components of the V2. He is successful in sabotaging three or four suppliers but is finally caught and spends 18 months imprisoned and brutally tortured on a daily basis at the hands of Mayer. Marie is also tracked down and treated in a similar fashion. Wiegmann is a natural storyteller, seamlessly weaving his characters Jansen, Parisi, and Mayer into the larger historical fabric, which features real-life figures like Wild Bill Donovan, Wernher von Braun, and Robert Goddard. (Helpfully, the author also includes an afterword listing all the historical figures included in the novel and a brief minibiography of each.) Particularly well rendered are the training sessions in spycraft in which Jansen proves an ideal pupil and the dramatic run-ins with the Gestapo. There are also torture scenes that are so vividly drawn they may be hard for some readers to stomach. The only real downside here is occasionally stiff dialogue (“Lieutenant, you and men like you make me proud to wear this uniform”) reminiscent of propaganda films that Hollywood was churning out during the war. But issues like these are minor and can’t detract from the novel’s page-turning plot and believable action.
A meticulously detailed spy story that delivers action, international intrigue, and seductive romance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 145
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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