September 29, 2014
An overly melodramatic setup mars this tepid WWII thriller from Janes, who has done excellent work in his St. Cyr/Kohler series (Carnival, etc.). In September 1941, Mary Ellen Fraser is caught between the "British, the Reich and the IRA" in Northern Ireland. Mary has become intimately involved with Erich Kramer, a captured German U-boat captain held at a POW camp where her husband works as a doctor. When she agrees to deliver a letter from Erich to a cousin of his in Dublin, she becomes an unwitting tool of the enemy. Meanwhile, IRA terrorist bombings continue, and Winston Churchill worries that the Nazis and the Irish revolutionaries are plotting to do "something" in Northern Ireland. The plot twists lead up to an ending that stretches plausibility. If Janes wants readers to become truly engaged with Mary, he needs to give his lead more psychological depth.