The Arms Maker of Berlin

June 22, 2009
Four missing documents from WWII provide the fuel for Fesperman’s fine stand-alone thriller. The FBI hires Nat Turnbull, a Nazi expert at a second-tier New England university, to find the documents, but Nat soon discovers that the agency has reasons other than historical integrity for wanting them found: to keep a lid on certain war-era sins committed by a German industrialist whose enormous company has been a major weapons supplier to the West. As Turnbull shuttles between Europe and the U.S., he manages to stay a step ahead of a mysterious killer who’s knocking off anyone who may know something about the missing files. Fesperman (The Prisoner of Guantánamo
) convincingly evokes the fraying Reich in 1944, a time of shifting allegiances when many Germans focused on positioning themselves for a Hitler-less future, though the who and why of all the recent killings remain somewhat murky. Still, readers who like a bit of history with their thrills will be thoroughly satisfied.

July 15, 2009
Thriller veteran Fesperman (The Amateur Spy, 2008, etc.) sets his protagonist to track the lives of six people caught up in World War II through a dangerous present-day archive.

The author finds new life in old clues (invisible ink, a book holding a pressed rose) as he constructs an intricate plot. Nat Turnbull, a professor of modern German history, learns that Pennsylvania police stormed into the home of his mentor, Gordon Wolfe, and removed files containing the records of intelligence work Wolfe did concerning German resistance efforts during World War II. Waiting in the shadows of the library where Turnbull works stands an FBI agent who wants him to examine the files, which reputedly contain explosive secrets about the war. Turnbull discovers that four folders—the most important ones, of course—are missing. Conveniently enough, Berta Heinkel of Berlin's Free University appears, offering to help Turnbull find the documents. Can he trust her? (Can German women in spy novels ever be trusted?) He thinks not when he finds someone has made off with vital laptop files in his hotel room while he was across the hall having sex with her. Heinkel sets Turnbull after Kurt Bauer, survivor of a German munitions family much like the Krupps. In ongoing flashbacks, which sometimes overlap and repeat points from the main plot, Bauer joins and ultimately betrays the German resistance movement known as White Rose. Then Bauer crosses to Bern, Switzerland, which here seems nearly as central to war activity as Berlin. Personal motives outweigh ideological ones as Bauer plays one side against the other to keep his family, which has Jewish ancestry, out of the concentration camps. In a poignant denouement, Turnbull brings together five of the six survivors caught up in Bauer's plotting, their war wounds forever tender.

Well-crafted entertainment that also delivers complex truths about warfare and survival.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2009
History professor Nat Turnbull, who specializes in the German resistance, is called in to examine four boxes of World War II archives stolen by his onetime mentor. But key files are missing from the boxes. When his mentor is found dead in jail, the FBI hires Nat to track down the missing files. The trail turns out to be dangerous, as an aging Berlin arms dealer fights to hide evidence of his collaboration with the Nazis. VERDICT Winner of the John Creasy Memorial Dagger Award and the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, Fesperman ("The Prisoner of Guantánamo") writes well. His characters are believable, and the strong and credible plot will especially appeal to fans of World War II espionage fiction. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 4/1/09.]DK

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2009
In the jaded world of the postmodern spy novel, there are no good guys or bad guys, no black or whitejust a thousand shades of gray. This combination of anomie and espionage can get tiresome after awhile, but in Fespermans newest novel (after The Amateur Spy, 2008), he spices things up by adding the old tried-and-trueNazis. After an old friend and mentor is accused of stealing classified government documents from World War II and then mysteriously dies, history professor Nat Turnbull goes on an international search to clear his name and to discover the secrets behind the stolen files. Joining him on the quest is a secretive (yet attractive) German academic, Berta Heinkel, who always seems one step ahead of him. Lurking behind the scenes and working diligently (and brutally) to keep the secrets hidden is Kurt Bauer, the elderly scion of a German munitions empire. The narrative takes place alternately in the present time as well as the 1940s and the clues come steadily, but the solution is not apparent until the very endno one will say, I saw that coming. This one is definitely not your out-of-the-box spy caper, thus, highly recommended.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)