Fatherland

The year is 1964. Nazi Germany has won WWII, Hitler is alive and well, and Joseph P. Kennedy is president of the United States. Berlin detective Xavier March enters this mad world to investigate a drowning and instead finds murder, suspicion, and a terrifying secret. The listener is thrust into the plot from the start. There's no back-story, no explanations--just satisfying intimacy and immediacy, as in film noir. This BBC Radio 4 full-cast production truly creates an audio movie, saturated with spot-on sound effects. The trains, the cheap cigarettes, and the cold drizzle surround you. Excellent on the ears and provocative in the "what ifs" of alternate history. B.P. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

May 4, 1992
An eerie, detailed alternate history serves as the backdrop for this otherwise conventional crime thriller. The setting is Berlin, 1964, some 20 years after the Third Reich's victory in WW II. Germany and the U.S., the world's two superpowers, find themselves in a cold war resulting from a nuclear stalemate; but U.S. President Joseph P. Kennedy is soon to visit Berlin for an historic summit meeting with Hitler, clearing the way for detente. Meanwhile, cynical police detective Xavier March investigates the drowning of Josef Buhler, former state secretary in the General Government. When the Gestapo takes over the case--ruling it suicide--March continues his investigation at the risk of his life, uncovering a deadly conspiracy at the highest levels of the Reich. With the help of American reporter Charlotte Maguire, he finds hard evidence of the wartime extermination of Europe's Jews, a secret that Buhler and his colleagues have been murdered to protect. Of course March and Maguire fall in love along the way. Harris ( Selling Hitler ) generates little suspense in this tale beyond his piecemeal rendering of the novel's unusual historical setting. The characters are flat and the plot largely predictable. And readers may well question the taste of using the Holocaust as the point of departure for a rather insubstantial, derivative thriller. 75,000 first printing; BOMC selection.