“Their odds of returning alive are about the same as playing Russian Roulette with five loaded chambers — one in six.”
On a secret mission, Lt. Art Sutton’s team of US Rangers parachutes into Nazi Germany weeks before the end of World War II … and vanishes.
Missing in Action for seven decades.
2011. Sutton’s team lands on target in Bavaria. Unaware of the passage of time, the Rangers begin their operation: sabotage, assassinations and assaults on military targets. Believing the Rangers to be terrorists, modern Germany’s elite counterterrorism unit – led by unrepentant Nazi Hanno Kasper – hunts them.
Wounded and left behind after a gun battle, Sutton realizes that he has landed in a future world very different from 1945. He races against time to save his men, knowing that Kasper has given the order:
Take no prisoners.
Redolent with the tantalising flavours of movies such as “The Philadelphia Experiment and “Final Countdown”, this novel takes the time slip premise and turns it into something that is unique, refreshing and very hard to put down.
The characters are written in a crisp and precise manner, and are fleshed out in such a way that the reader could actually visualise the scenarios they face being plausible. This fact in itself takes this book far out of the realm of being just another time travel/sci-fi piece of writing. There are two characters I certainly did not care for at all in its pages, and this was not because they were badly written; it was because they were so well written that when they appeared one left a bad taste in my mouth, and the other left me wondering how he could not have learnt anything from the fate of his Family. The male protagonist really pulled at my emotions, as his story unfolded so did his bewilderment at living in a time that was so far removed from the one he grew up in. The Author skillfully depicts the way in which he is torn between the moral code instilled in him during his formative years, and the moral code that is now the norm in the 21st century. The reader is pulled into this characters bewilderment and wonder at the things he now sees in the world he has entered; but is also drawn along with the urgency he feels at preventing the needless deaths of his comrades. He is asked to re-evaluate many of his beliefs, and we feel keenly the pain he experiences at having to make decisions that he would not normally be faced with. The remainder of the characters in this novel are not treated with any less detail; we learn of the Alabama boy who just wants to go home; the ex Hitler Jugend who still believes in the Nazi tenants and, in his position of power, is intent of seeing them to fruition; the war widow who believes that her Husband was lost over 60 years previously and the ex Viet Nam Vet who is intent on making sure that the men he is trying to find do not die as “terrorists”. All the characters bring out some kind of emotion in the reader, whether it is revulsion, empathy or just sorrow they are written so well.
In the scene setting, the Authors remarkable knowledge of the areas the plot takes place in is highly visible, he knows his way round the Bavarian Forest and all the areas his characters visit are obviously well-known to him. He also shows a deep and accurate understanding of, not only modern terrorism, weapons and anti-terrorist Special Forces, but also about World War II era history and culture and this adds a whole new depth to the novel that could otherwise have been missing. The reader feels as if they are in the forests, walking through the German towns in the dead of night, even stood in the Scottish pub mentioned at the opening of this book.
My only complaint about this novel was the silly little errors that slipped by the proofreaders and editors; things such as double words (the the) and also for some bizarre reason not all, but a vast majority of words that ended in ‘rn’ were appearing throughout the book as ending with ‘m’. This led to some very unusual sentences, where ‘burn’ became ‘bum’ and ‘turn’ became ‘tum’. They were nothing major, but enough to make me disgruntled that this fast paced exciting novel had been marred somehow, by these errors.
I thoroughly enjoyed this fast paced thriller, and would recommend it to readers from teens upwards, and also those who enjoy reading the time travel/World War II/sci-fi genres. In fact I would recommend this novel to anyone that enjoys a hard to put down good read. This is definitely one you could curl up in your favourite chair with and become truly engrossed in.
Cate's Book Nut Hut 