Fear Itself

Starred review from August 27, 2012
This top-notch historical thriller from Rosenheim (Stillriver), the first in a new series, introduces 26-year-old Jimmy Nessheim, an FBI agent in the Chicago field office. In 1937, a jealous J. Edgar Hoover is looking to rid the Chicago office of staff members âtaintedâ by their connection with real-life G-man Melvin Purvis, who led the manhunts that tracked down Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and John Dillinger. Fortunately, FBI assistant director Harry Guttman rescues Nessheimâs career by tapping him to go undercover in the Chicago German-American community. In doing so, Guttman directly contravenes Hooverâs opposition to such covert work, but the resourceful Nessheim believes his mission has the directorâs blessing. With Nazi Germany eager to keep the U.S. out of the impending European war, the stakes are high. While Rosenheimâs prose and character portraits may not match those of Alan Furst at his best, this intelligent page-turner will only whet readerâs appetites for more. Agent: Gillon Aitken, Aitken Alexander Associates.

November 1, 2012
Serviceable historical thriller from publishing veteran Rosenheim. Junior FBI agent Jimmy Nessheim has a thorny problem on his hands: There are 40 million Americans of German descent, a great many of whom sympathize with the Nazis or at least want neutrality, and here the much-reviled Franklin Roosevelt is making noises that the U.S. might just have to go to war to contain Herr Hitler. Nessheim--and Roosevelt, for that matter--have reason to worry, for the German-American Bund, among other homegrown organizations, is chock-full of Nazi operatives, some of whom speak in sneers worthy of a Maj. Strasser ("Now tell me, Herr Werner, did you bring the weapon we sent you?"). Buried deep inside some nice leafy American suburb is a nasty Nazi Manchurian candidate called Dreilander--"he of three countries," that is--who's ready to pop up and work some mischief, and so Nessheim and his fellow G-men are, naturally, up against the clock. Can they defeat the Gestapo when there are so many suspects to interrogate? ("I've got an uncle named Maier. He's married to my mother's sister.") Maybe, and maybe not: Things could work out in a Philip Roth tangle. But Rosenheim's more conventional than all that, and if he includes the nice touch of putting the oft-neglected jurist Felix Frankfurter on stage--and Frankfurter just doesn't get to star in enough Bogart-worthy thrillers--then he's also not shy of layering in cliches and genre conventions to do his work for him: ."..his immersion in the water had left him looking entirely peaceful. And dead, thought Nessheim with a jolt." Why a jolt, one wonders? Did it only lately occur to Nessheim that the corpse was in fact dead? A rich premise, with a readable if sometimes predictable and heavy-handed delivery.

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November 15, 2012

Rosenheim's sixth book (after Without Prejudice) is a historical thriller set at the start of World War II before the United States had fully committed to the Allied cause. Many German Americans supported the Nazis by forming groups collectively called the Bund. When the Bund opens training camps in the upper Midwest, 26-year-old FBI agent Jimmy Nessheim wants to infiltrate the group but meets with resistance from Director J. Edgar Hoover, who is more interested in rousting communists than fascists. After one of Nessheim's informants reports submachine guns at one of the camps and is then found murdered, Nessheim begins to work against the Bund in secret. Meanwhile, from Berlin, security agent Walter Schellenberg prepares to activate a potentially lethal deep-cover agent, a German orphan raised in the United States and now in a position to change the fate of the war. VERDICT A former Rhodes scholar, Rosenheim has lived in England since 1977, where Fear Itself was published to acclaim in 2011. Announced as the first of a series of novels that will chronicle young Nessheim's wartime adventures, this book, reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, gets off to a rousing start.--Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2012
Young FBI agent Jimmy Nessheim is assigned to go undercover in the German American Bund in 1936. The assignment ignores J. Edgar Hoover's narrow focus on Communists, labor unions, and jazz musicians and violates Hoover's edict that FBI agents do not work undercover. Harry Guttman, the Jewish FBI agent who makes the assignment, knows he's risking his career and possibly Nessheim's life. But Nessheim's time in the Bund helps Guttman piece together a serious Nazi threat to the life of Franklin Roosevelt, which leads to another undercover assignment for Nessheim, this time in the White House. This is the first novel in a series projected to cover 1936 through World War II, and Rosenheim paints a disturbingly vivid portrait of the U.S. riven by the Great Depression, political conflicts, and concerns about looming war in Europe. The rumpled, intelligent Guttman is a compelling character who shrugs off the pervasive anti-Semitism he encounters in his fellow FBI agents. The Nazi plot is convoluted but effectively maintains tension, and Rosenheim's picture of pre-WWII America is riveting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)