The Bells of Hell

October 14, 2019
Set in 1938 New York City, this middling thriller from Edgar-finalist Kurland (The Infernal Device) opens promisingly enough. When Johann Steuber, posing as a German toy exporter, disembarks from his ship in Brooklyn, he’s met by two men who identify themselves as FBI agents and accuse him of being a member of the German Communist Party. Just minutes after they lead him away, the real FBI agents show up. The fake FBI agents, who are Nazi operatives, take Steuber to an abandoned building. By chance, Andrew Blake, an unemployed typesetter squatting in the building, witnesses Steuber’s torture and death. Though he was afraid to intervene, Blake does report the crime to the police and ends up being recruited by an Office of Special Intelligence agent to infiltrate a New York chapter of the Bund. After gaining the confidence of American Nazi sympathizers, Blake learns that Steuber’s abductors have a sinister plan that won’t surprise anyone who has read a lot of spy fiction set in this era. As Kurland’s Professor Moriarty series with its creative plotting and characterization shows, this author can do better.

Starred review from December 1, 2019
March 1938. A German spy, freshly arrived in New York City, is whisked away by men purporting to be FBI agents. Except they aren't. They're not law enforcement of any kind. And when the German man refuses to divulge the information they want, they beat him to death. Only there's a witness. And now the real agents are involved, including Jacob Welker, FDR's own counterintelligence operative, hunting down the fake government agents. But what plot will the investigators uncover, and how far does it reach? Kurland, who started out writing science fiction before expanding his repertoire to include (for example) novels about the notorious Professor Moriarty (Who Thinks Evil, 2014), knocks this historical thriller out of the park. Its plot is smartly designed, its characters are entirely believable, and its time and place are very well established. The theme of Nazi spies working in the U.S. is a rich if relatively untapped vein of WWII fiction, and this thoroughly involving thriller stands proudly alongside Dan Fesperman's The Letter Writer (2016), Elmore Leonard's Up in Honey's Room (2007), and John Dunning's Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime (2001), among others. Great stuff.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)