The arms maker of Berlin

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In the jaded world of the postmodern spy novel, there are no good guys or bad guys, no black or white just a thousand shades of gray. This combination of anomie and espionage can get tiresome after awhile, but in Fesperman's newest novel (after The Amateur Spy, 2008), he spices things up by adding the old tried-and-true Nazis. 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 end no one will say, I saw that coming. This one is definitely not your out-of-the-box spy caper, thus, highly recommended.--Gannon, Michael Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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 Guantanamo) 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. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

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 Guantùnamo) 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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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 foldersthe most important ones, of courseare 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 Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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ONE The biggest hazard of studying history," Nat Turnbull once told his wife, "is that if you spend too much time looking backward, you'll be facing the wrong way when the forces of the here and now roll forward to crush you." As if to prove the point, his wife filed for divorce the following week, catching Nat completely by surprise. Five years later he was again facing the wrong way, so to speak, when a pair of phone calls summoned him urgently back to the dangers of the present. He was three stories underground at the time, asleep at his desk in the stacks of the university library. An unlikely location, perhaps, for the beginning of an adventure in which lives would be lost, but Nat was trained to appreciate that sort of irony. The first call arrived just as a dark dream of another era goose-stepped across his brain. His cell phone jolted him awake, squirming in his pocket like a frog. Opening his eyes to utter darkness, Nat realized he must have slept past closing hour. It wasn't the first time. He kept a flashlight for these emergencies, but it seemed to have disappeared. No use groping for the lamp, either. Security would have cut the power by now. Library budgets weren't what they used to be at Wightman University. The phone twitched again as he fumbled in his pocket. He was addled, groggy, a miner regaining consciousness after a cave-in. What time was it? What day? What century ? Mandatory question in his line of work. Nat was a history professor. Specialty: Modern Germany. At Wightman that covered everything from the Weimar Republic of 1919 onward, and while Nat was in love with the sweep and grandeur of the whole era, neither friend nor foe was under any illusion as to his true calling. He remained as thoroughly haunted by the long shadow of the Third Reich as those Hitler-centric folks on the History Channel. In Nat's treasure hunts, X never marked the spot. A swastika did, or some pile of old bones. Dig at risk of contamination. He snicked open the phone, and the blue glow offered a beacon of hope until he saw the incoming number. Gordon Wolfe, his onetime master and commander, calling at 1:04 a.m., meant Nat was about to be subjected to an angry tirade or a teary confessional, and either would likely be served in a marinade of French cognac and Kentucky bourbon. He answered with a vague sense of stage fright. "Gordon?" "No, it's Viv. Gordon's in jail. You have to get up here." "Jail? What's happened?" "They took him away. Him and some archives. They took everything." "Gordon's archives? All of them? Where are you, Viv?" "Blue Kettle Lake. Our summer place." The Adirondacks. Of course. That was where the old Minotaur always retreated when the going got tough, and lately the going had been unbearable. "The police handcuffed him the moment we walked in the door. You'd have thought he was John Dillinger. They're saying he stole it, that he stole everything, which is nuts." "Stole what, Viv? Slow down. Start at the beginning." By now the phone light had switched off. Nat, sole survivor of the European Research Collection, again sat in the darkness of carrel C-19 in the basement stacks of Hartsell Library. He had often boasted he could find his way out of here blindfolded. Tonight he might have to put up or shut up. His nose could have told him the approximate location--musty leather bindings, chilled concrete, the chemical reek of spooled ?microfilm--a bouquet that probably explained why he had just been dreaming of a similar place across the Atlantic. Except there all the writing was in German and the records were haunted by so much industrialized horror that you never got comfy enough to nod off. In his dream Excerpted from The Arms Maker of Berlin by Dan Fesperman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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