What a great novel. WWII fiction depicting a raid on a concentration camp that was developing poison gas for the Nazis. Story is as simple as that. No real twists or turns to keep you guessing, just straight forward fiction that keeps you from putting this book down. Greg Iles is becoming one of my favorite authors. I have a few more sitting on my shelf now and will be looking for the rest of his soon. Great stuff. ( )

I couldn't put this book down, this guy can write!

I'm pretty stingy with five-star ratings, but if I could, I'd give this book more than five stars. It hooked me from the first page, and I found it difficult to put it down. The characters are all wonderfully done and complex, even the Nazis (unfortunately, most historical fiction books I've read from this era tend to make Nazi characters two-dimensional evil villains; Schörner is probably the best done fictional Nazi I've read - Iles captures both his blood-chilling ruthlessness and his more refined qualities perfectly). The ending felt rushed and rather fake, but I'm willing to forgive that for the rest of the novel. I'm definitely going to be reading more books by this author in the future. ( )

When a young Atlanta physician attends the funeral of the grandparents who raised him, he is approached by silver-haired rabbi who claims to have known his grandfather well. Retuning together to the family home, they open his grandfather's safe. There they discover four mysterious objects. They are the relics of a man haunted by something he did one winter night in 1944, an act that brought him unparalleled honors, but left wounds in his soul that would never heal. As the story of these secret souvenirs unfolds, the grandson's concept of honor is stretched to the breaking point and his notion of heroism redefined forever.
In January 1944, four people held the fate of the world in their hands. They were not statesmen or generals, but an American doctor, a German nurse, a Zionist killer, and a young Jewish widow.
At the command of Winston Churchill, these four strangers are brought together in a place almost beyond imagination. It is a small SS-run concentration camp serving as the incubator for a weapon of staggering lethality, a weapon U.S. General Omar Bradley later admitted could have wiped out the D-day invasion force on Omaha Beach. What they were forced to do in the name of victory and survival demonstrates with terrible clarity that in a world where all is at stake, war has no rules.
Black Cross explodes the myth of World War II as "the good war." It is a novel of transforming power, in which healer must become destroyer and a young killer is tempered by love into a savior.
Peopled with men and women as compellingly human as he historical figures who manipulate them. Black Cross will pull you into a steadily tightening web of danger and deception that seems impossible to resolve until the explosive final chapter. ( )