![]() The royal heirs have been sent to neutral Ireland with the believe they will find safety there, removed from the nightly bombing of London by the Luftwaffe. Now, in The Secret Guests, Black/Banville has produced a more commercial spy thriller about the World War II sequestration of Britain’s princesses Elizabeth and Margaret on an Irish estate during the height of the Blitz. This focus on close calls makes for an engaging read, but calls for the more-historically inclined reader to suspend disbelief a few times too many.īenjamin Black is a pen name for John Banville, an Irish author who is no stranger to writing about espionage-his 2009 novel, The Untouchables, retold the story of the infamous Cambridge spies through the eyes of an Anthony Blunt-like figure, Victor Maskell. Some may find that Three Hours in Paris too often veers into Dan Brown territory, with Kate threatened with capture by the Germans numerous times and always managing a clever (and near miraculous) escape. Her deep knowledge of Parisian life during World War II adds a welcome authenticity to her tale. It’s a difficult task, but she succeeds in crafting a page-turner that keeps the reader guessing. ![]() Kate Rees will fail in her mission-and the reader knows this in advance-and so Black’s challenge is to explore why her riflewoman misses her mark when she has Hitler in her sights, and how she will evade the German detective, Gunter Hoffman, who is intent on hunting her down. Her protagonist in Three Hours in Paris, an American named Kate Rees who happens to be a crack shot with a rifle, is recruited by British intelligence to kill Adolf Hitler when he visits Paris for three hours (hence the novel’s title). Cara Black has adapted this plot, with a clever twist, in a novel set in Paris in June 1940, just as the Nazis have occupied the City of Light. The premise isn’t new-it’s the basis for many historical thrillers, including Geoffrey Household’s marvelous Rogue Male and Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. Sadly, when it came to the complicity of von Braun and other German scientists, the exigencies of the Cold War arms race trumped the interests of justice. At the same time, he delivers a scorching indictment of von Braun-who was brought to the United States after the war and became the architect of the American space program-as an amoral schemer and careerist who welcomed the SS’s war crimes at Peenemünde (slave labor, summary executions, etc.) when they helped him build his missiles. Harris delivers a tightly-plotted, deeply-researched tale, with enough twists and turns to keep the reader glued to the page. ![]() Graf, and his friend, Wernher von Braun, the leader of the V2 program, had been drawn to missile technology by their dream of building spaceships. Harris’ novel focuses on two characters-Kay Caton-Walsh, a young British intelligence officer who becomes involved in the search-and-destroy efforts against the V2 launch sites in Belgium and Rudi Graf, a V2 engineer, whose doubts about Nazism and his role in the German war machine have grown. ![]() While the German missiles caused death and damage in England, they had little, if any, impact on the outcome of the war. The development and use of the V2 reflected Adolf Hitler’s desperate quest for miracle weapons ( Wunderwaffe), an attempt to stave off Germany’s defeat at the hands of the Allies. Novelist Robert Harris ( Fatherland Munich) has returned with a World War II thriller about the British military response to the V2 rockets that the Germans sent raining down on London in 1944, destroying buildings and killing civilians. V2: A novel of World War II by Robert Harris Please note that I’m partial to historical fiction and authors who have a way with words the novels I’ve selected reflect that bias. ![]() What are the top spy novels of 2020? Here are my picks (updated as novels are published throughout the year). ![]()
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