One reason I write these articles is because it forces me to read a variety of authors and books. I frequently stumble across a book I really like. This happened last week. I read “The Arms Maker of Berlin” by Dan Fesperman and finished it in a couple of days. It is an espionage thriller set toward the end of World War II. I just could not put it down.
Dan Fesperman is a journalist and war correspondent. His work has taken him to 30 countries and three wars—The Persian Gulf War in 1991, the Yugoslav civil wars in 1994 and Afghanistan in 2001. While covering the Persian Gulf War, Fesperman and a colleague accepted the surrender of 10 Iraqi soldiers in the Kuwait Desert. In Afghanistan he survived a fatal convoy ambush. He has led an exciting life and writes about what he knows. He advises aspiring writers to write the kind of books you would like to read.
I too would like to write espionage thrillers. Unfortunately, the closest I have ever come to a war zone was attending a Nebraska/Colorado game in Boulder. You can only say so much about the terror of taking a beer bath at a football game.
“The Arms Make of Berlin” is a fine, fine book. Unlike Festerman’s other books, which are modern thrillers, it is a historical novel. History professor Nat Turnbull is a specialist in the German resistance of World War II. He is pulled into this case when his old mentor Gordon Wolfe is accused of stealing four boxes of W.W.II archives. Four files from the boxes are missing. After Wolfe is found dead in his jail cell, the FBI hires Turnbull to find the missing files. Joining him in his quest is a German academic, Berta Heinkel, who by the way is extremely attractive. Her obsession with this case perplexes Nat. She seems to be hiding something. (Aren’t German women in spy novels always hiding something? I am tempted to say, “The plot thickens.” Oh, I guess I did.)
The search for the missing espionage files takes the reader back and forth in time from the present to the 1940s. Third Reich was crumpling and ex-Nazis were trying to cover their tracks in spy-thick Switzerland. An elderly man, Kurt Bauer, scion of a German munitions empire, (think arms of Krupp) wants to keep what is hidden in those documents secret. The mystery of the missing files—a threat from Iranian terrorists—a sizzling romance and espionage intrigues all combine to make this spy novel real a humdinger.
“The Arms Make of Berlin” will keep you guessing to the end. I highly recommend it. The library also has two other novels by Dan Fesperman, “The Prisoner of Guantanamo” and “The Warlord’s Son”.
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