William Brown’s “Winner Lose All”

It’s early 1945. Hitler’s Germany is teetering; the eastern and western fronts are drawing close to German borders. But the Nazis are making one last-gasp effort with a rain of V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs on London, and German scientists may yet pull a rabbit out of a hat with a new jet fighter plane.

Ed Scanlon, an American army captain, is dropped behind enemy lines, to help local partisans in Leipzig disrupt German war efforts. The partisans are led by Hanni Steiner, a young communist who also happens to by an agent for Stalin’s NKVD. They work together, have a passionate affair and fall in love, roughly in that order. Scanlon is captured and taken to Gestapo headquarters, where he’s brutally tortured. Hanni organizes a daring rescue raid on Gestapo headquarters, and Ed is finally transported to safety in England.

But the Americans and the Soviets want those German jet fighter scientists. Scanlon, still recovering from his ordeal, is sent back to Leipzig. His primary motive for returning is to find Hanni, who’s been arrested by the Gestapo. He’s also to work with a German army officer to find and get the scientists to the American army in Bavaria. The head of the Leipzig Gestapo is working with the Soviets to get those same scientists to Russia. And the British would prefer that neither side get what they want.

Scanlon finds treachery everywhere he turns.

In Winner Lose All, William Brown has written another crackerjack novel of World War II, following last year’s Amongst My Enemies. The descriptions of the events, the people (including Stalin, Beria and Churchill) and the geography re so detailed and vivid that the reader is right there, carried along for one wild, breathtaking ride.

And in the process, Brown explores the themes of courage and treachery, love and fear, playing them through the characters in ways both real and often surprising. Who “wins” the triangulated race to get the scientists – and perhaps supreme power in the post-war world – may also be the one who loses the most.

Winner Lose All is an exciting, riveting read.

Related: My reviews of William Brown’s previous books:

Amongst My Enemies

Thursday at Noon

The Undertaker

Illustration (top): Leipzig Town Hall prior to World War II.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s been a while since I posted a Pleasantly Disturbed Friday, or even had an update on my most favorite of subjects: The Grandsons!

Cameron has now turned three. A couple of weeks ago, while Janet was out of town visiting her mother, I went over to the son and daughter-in-law’s house for dinner. If I didn’t know it before, I know it now: Cameron owns his grandfather.

And then Caden, almost one, crawling, standing and climbing, watching everything with a slightly suspicious look (“Do I know you? Are you sure?”), following Cameron and his grandfather into Cameron’s bedroom – to fix the Brio toy set, play with stuffed animals, play hide and seek, whatever Cameron can come up with (and he comes up with a lot).

Caden startled his mother the other day when she found sitting on Cameron’s trampoline. And then on the fireplace hearth. It’s called batten-down-the-hatches time.

Since mid-February, work has been intense. I should write that in all capital letters. Crisis after crisis are blending together into a rather large ongoing crisis mishmash. One day I found myself tweeting about three different crises at the same time, and I had to focus to slowly check each tweet to make sure I was tweeting the right one at any given moment.

Factoid: I’ve now read 69 books on the Amazon Kindle.

The crises at work means I’m generally reading less, but I am still reading. Currently that means the World War II suspense novel Winner Lose All by William Brown; Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge for the Tweetspeak Poetry book discussion; Not So Fast by Ann Kroeker for the High Calling book discussion; and The Grace of God by Andy Stanley for what I call the Jason-Sarah Wednesday book discussion.

Waiting patiently to be read are Lapse Americana: Poems by Benjamin Myers, which just arrived this week; Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca; and My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman.

If the weather cooperates, I hope to get on the bike this weekend. Several people have asked me about my bike ride Wildlife Reports I post on Facebook after each ride. I list the numbers and kinds of wildlife I encounter while riding, in descending evolutionary order: horses, dogs, cats, birds, roller bladders, and bikers talking on their cell phones.

Factoid: Longest bike ride I’ve ever done: 93 miles, from Boonville, Missouri, to Hermann, Missouri, on the Katy Trail. Shortest bike ride I’ve ever done: three blocks from my house (my very first ride when I started biking; it was almost physical collapse).

I’m still working with my personal trainer. That means I’m still doing exercises with exotic names like cat’n’camel, bear crawl, scorpion, and dead bug. My un-favorite is the dead bug, epically when I have to put 10-pound weights on my ankles and lift a 10-pound medicine ball from my feet to my hands. And while I’m lying on the floor. They don’t call it Dead Bug for nothing.

Photographs of Cameron and Caden Young by their mother, Stephanie Young.