William Brown's "Amongst My Enemies"

I’m not a fan of movies or books about World War II. And I don’t normally read espionage thrillers. So I approached William Brown’s Amongst My Enemies with something akin to hesitation, because it’s a novel about World War II and its aftermath and Cold War espionage. But I had read and reviewed Brown’s novel The Undertaker and really liked it, so I thought I would overcome my usual reluctance and read this new one.

I’d forgotten how much I could enjoy a good story, even if it is about subjects I don’t usually read. And Amongst My Enemies is one good, nail biting story.

Michael Randall and Eddie Hodges are part of the American crew flying in a B-17 bomber. The plane is hit after a bombing run over Berlin; Randall and Hodges are the only crew members to survive. They’re eventually taken prisoner and find themselves part of a prisoner labor gang in the east Prussian city of Konigsberg. Hodges gets frostbite which leads to gangrene; he convinces his friend to help him kill himself and extracts a promise: Randall has to survive and tell Hodges’ family what happened – and the horror of Nazi Germany.

Randall’s group of prisoners is forced to load a U-boat with all kinds of odd-shaped boxes – a U-boat reconstructed to carry cargo instead of torpedos. The operation is under the supervision of an SS officer, Heniz Kruger, who reports directly to Nazi chieftain Martin Bormann. What’s inside the boxes is to be shipped to Argentina. Among his other qualities, Kruger enjoys killing people.

Randall is able to hide out on the U-boat but is found once the submarine is underway. The captain, “the last decent man in Germany’s military,” has Randall placed in a rubber dingy off the coast of Sweden. Minutes later, the U-boat is bombed and sunk by British fighter planes.

The shell-shocked American spends the next three years with the Swedish fish boat captain who plucks him from the Baltic. And then he returns to the United States to keep his promise to his friend.

I provide that detailed background because it sets the stage for what unfolds over the next four years. What Michael Randall knows about that U-boat will become of critical importance to the New York police, the new Israeli government, the Russians, the CIA and a very much alive Martin Bormann, who didn’t die as reported in the final days of Hitler’s Berlin. Bormann is very much alive in Bolivia – and has an able assistant named Heinz Kruger. And Bormann wants his U-boat.

Brown has done an enormous amount of research in writing this novel, from the details of a U-boat interior and the fishing industry in Sweden to Nazi politics and legends and underwater salvage operations. The novel is a fast, exciting read – the author excels at keeping the reader both gasping for air and reading on.

I still may not be a fan of World War II and espionage novels, but I am becoming a fan of William Brown. Amongst My Enemies is a highly entertaining novel.

Related:

My review of Brown’s The Undertaker.

Brown's web site.

Me and My Kindle

I had delayed buying an e-reader for a long time. It wasn’t that I was a “physical book I can hold in my hand or nothing” kind of person. It was more “this isn’t a priority right now.” I knew I did not like reading a book on my desktop computer. But Father’s Day was coming, and I solved my wife’s problem for a gift by saying I’d like to have a Kindle.

In due course, it arrived, “it” being the Kindle 3G. A friend at work had an earlier version. He had recently upgraded to a 3G, which he said was a vast improvement over earlier models.

Having the Kindle in my hands, I had to test it out. Immediately. The instructions were simple, and within seconds I had my first e-book, Gravestone by Travis Thrasher.

Oh, my goodness.

Instant gratification.

Press a button and it’s here.

Okay, so obtaining a book was easy. What would it be like to read one? Would I like it, or would I discover that that Father’s Day present was destined to sit on a shelf, gathering dust?

Gravestone was surprisingly easy to read. It was a good introduction to reading an e-book – fast paced and engaging, I’d read a page, press the advance button, and keep going.

I finished Gravestone and said, OK, that was all right. But what about poetry?

Right about that time, Maureen Doallas over at Writing Without Paper had a feature about poet Julie Kane, and noted that her first book of poetry, Body and Soul, was only available on Kindle. Ah, ha, a test! So I downloaded the poems, and found that poetry was just as easy to read.

Since then, I’ve two more, the suspense novel The Undertaker by William Brown and Underworld: The Modern Orpheus, poems by Matthew Duggan. And I took advantage of two promotional specials I ran across, one on Facebook and the other on a blog, and downloaded the English Standard Version of the Bible and another mystery/suspense novel, both of which were free (there may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there is such a thing as a free book) (and the ESV is still available on Kindle for free, as least right now). And I downloaded Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit by Luci Shaw, just in time to start reading it for the weekly book discussion at The High Calling.

Two novels and two books of poetry later, I can say that I really like this little e-reader. I like it a lot. It’s easy to use. It’s back-lit, so you don’t get a lot of glare. It’s easily portable. And it can carry up to 3500 books. That last factor alone wowed my wife, who sees a solution to the bookcases that threaten to overwhelm our house.

It’s not better or worse than reading a physical book. And there are going to be some books that simply won’t work on a Kindle; I’m thinking here of books like The Four Holy Gospels, illustrated by Makoto Fujimura, which is more like a work of art than books.

But for the vast majority of books, the Kindle will work fine. 

As I sit here, reading on my Kindle, that with the cover weighs less than 14 ounces, I’m beginning to glimpse one of the forces transforming the book publishing business. 

William Brown's "The Undertaker"

You’re trying to work through the death of your wife from cancer. You’ve left southern California for Boston, to work at your brother-in-law’s computer firm. You’re living a quiet, solitary, cubicle kind of life. And then one day, you walk to your car after work, and a Mafia hit man climbs into your car. And he shows you your obituary. And your wife’s. And you read them to find out that both of you have been buried in Columbus, Ohio.

The hit man leaves. But Peter Talbot translates grief into a raging anger. Someone has stolen the memory of his wife. And he decides to find out who did it. Along the way, he’s going to fund a corrupt attorney, an undertaker who asks no questions, a doctor who performs interesting experiments (like murder), a love interest with the karate-kicking widow of another victim of a similar identity theft, and violence, murder and general mayhem stretching from Columbus to Chicago, Chicago to Boston, Boston to New York, and finally to where the path of corruption ultimately leads, Washington, D.C.

With The Undertaker, William Brown has written one wild, fast-paced, action saturated suspense novel that could easily be an R-rated thriller with actor Matt Damon in the lead. The story never lets up: in fact, the story never even pauses. If you can imagine an ambulance driven by a dead man careening around a mortuary parking lot and a wild car-and-train chase scene near and on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago, then you can capture some of what this novel is about. (having been in Chicago recently, and having driven the Dan Ryan at rush hour, I found this particular scene utterly realistic and totally terrifying.)

Brown has taken what could have been an improbable story and masterfully turned it into a convincing story. The main characters – Talbot and the widow, Sandy Kasmarek – are drawn well and believable (even the karate kicks). And the creepy, sadistic lawyer is a character right out of Hitchcock.

The author has written two previous novels, The Allah Conspiracy and Thursday at Noon. The Undertaker is available only as an e-book, on Kindle, Nook, iBook and Sony Reader. I read it on Kindle, and it’s worth buying a Kindle for.

If I could only catch my breath.


You can read more about William Brown and his novels at his web site.