Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... On Desperate Groundby James R. Benn
None No current Talk conversations about this book.  Leighton | May 9, 2012 |  no reviews | add a review
Danger reigns supreme as Nazi Germany braces for a final showdown in this WWII thriller from the author of the Billy Boyle mysteries. On Desperate Ground is the story of men and women caught up in the death throes of Nazi Germany, struggling to maintain those things precious to them--life, an end to killing, and even sanity itself. Colonel Johann Faust has lost everyone he ever loved and feels he is going inexorably insane. He hears the haunting voice of his dead fiancée and the demons that roar through his mind as he perfects a plan to save Nazi Germany from defeat and insure a greater and deadlier new world war. Captain Dieter Neukirk, once a protégé of Faust's, is more concerned with saving the lives of his remaining men than sacrificing them in a fanatical last stand. Meanwhile, Elsa Klein, Dieter's lover and the chief social worker at a Berlin hospital, is engaged in her own dangerous work, providing medical care and identity papers to hidden Jews in the city. American Captain Mack Mackenzie, pulled from a military hospital before his wounds are healed, is assigned to investigate reports of a secret Nazi operation. Wanting only to make it home alive, Mack finds himself in a life and death struggle with unlikely allies and a ferociously determined opponent. Americans and Germans alike are drawn to a hilltop in the remote German countryside, where they find themselves between powerful armies and forced into a terrible decision that could end one war or begin a new one. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.67)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
2
In the first chapter of ON DESPERATE GROUND, author James Benn shows him heading up an elite unit during the German invasion of the Netherlands in May of 1940. He’s a brilliant soldier, a man with an air of command, intensely respected by his troops and looking forward to a brilliant future in the New Germany.
Five years later, Colonel Faust is still fighting, but his hopes have been shattered, and his dreams are haunted by horrors.
The Russians, in their drive to the West, have occupied his family’s estates, raped and murdered his beloved fiancée and killed both her parents and his own.
Faust, overwhelmed by his demons, has come to live for only one thing: to spill Russian blood. And, to that end, nothing would please him more than to prolong the war.
In Berlin, Hitler is desperate for a plan to stave off the downfall of his Third Reich, and he falls in with a suggestion of Faust’s – a scheme to pit the Americans and their Communist allies against one another.
The men of Himmler’s SS approve of the plan, but want if for their own, and they set out to undermine Faust.
Meanwhile, two saner men, one from each side, have other ideas.
One is Captain Matthew Mackenzie, a young American intelligence officer, and a former cop, recently injured in the Battle of the Bulge.
The other, Dieter Neukirk, is a German officer roped into Faust’s machinations, and a man who once happily served under him as a lieutenant, but who has now become weary of war and has been looking forward to the end of the conflict.
His fiancée, Elsa Klein, a social worker, shares his hopes –and is deeply involved in an operation to save Jews from the Nazi death camps.
As the book progresses to an exciting climax, the American officer and the German couple work together to preserve lives, escape the SS and thwart Faust’s plan.
If you take as much delight in James Benn’s Billy Boyle series as I do, you’re going to adore this, his first standalone.
And, if you’re as yet unfamiliar with Billy and his adventures, I suggest you get cracking with the first of them.
Benn is an author who’s unbeatable when it comes to bringing World War Two alive. (