Whereas the guns going quiet with a ceasefire (armistice) marked the finis of World War I, World War II ended with unconditional surrender. Tens of millions, soldiers and civilians, perished in both struggles. The sides realigned in the Cold War with far fewer deaths.
The Third Reich, like the ancient Vandals, robbed, stole and burned the Europe of old. The difference was that the barbarians weren't art collectors. Much is made of the post-war Nuremburg trials; however, few of the high-ranking murderers were brought to justice after fleeing the country with their ill-gotten gains.
Nazi hunters tracked down and brought back a tiny fraction. The majority went to South America, a costly sanctuary. Old age took its toll. The search for the stolen art continues. Now and then a writer asks whether the Third Reich, with its Arayan master-race beliefs, was really the end of them.
The UK TV survival show host Bear Grylls does so in Ghost Flight. Like Chris Ryan and Andy McNab, he was in the SAS before talking pen to paper. He applies his worldwide survival expertise to his stories. His literary creation, Will Jaeger, is based on himself.
His venues are England and Scotland, equatorial Africa and the rainforests of Brazil. It's rather far-fetched how Jaeger lost his wife and son in Scotland -- abducted during a gas attack, no contact since, perhaps dead. Grieving, he goes to Africa to teach English, is imprisoned, tortured, escapes.
Hearing stories about a plane that crashed during World War II in the wilds of Brazil, he teams up with a Maori, an Australian television photographer, a female Russian special-forces officer, local Indians, and a female Brazilian social worker. Also looking for the plane are the Dark Forces, firing on them from helicopters.
Grylls does not omit the danger of the Amazon: deadly spiders, leeches, piranha, vampire fish that feast on piranha. The located plane contains coded lists of names of Nazis at large. The code cracked, there's a 1945 message from Hitler about starting a Fourth Reich to make the Third Reich seem a child's game.
Ghost Flight doesn't have a clear ending, leading the reader to expect a follow-up. The dangerous locales the author will take us to then is anybody's guess. The real-life creatures described in detail put you off your food.
As for the coming of the Fourth Reich, I'm not holding my breath.
Headline thriller
Yank Mary Higgins Clark has been around for ages, penning scores of crime thrillers. Unlike her colleagues, she doesn't tax her imagination for plots. Rather, she assures her vast readership that she looks no further than the daily newspapers for subject matter. Which needs little embellishing.
Nary a day goes by without crimes committed, here and abroad -- so many that we've become virtually inured to all but the most heinous of them. But she is fascinated by them all. Who did it? What was the motive? Were there mitigating circumstances that might make them appear justified?
Clark's novels aren't superficial. Such questions arise, are discussed, analysed. Which bends the Crime Does Not Pay rule, but doesn't break it. This occasionally raises a chuckle, the perpetrator avoiding human justice yet unable to evade divine justice (via fatal disease).
In The Melody Lingers On, Clark notes that there's more to Wall Street than stocks and bonds. Banking, for one. Investment funds, for another. The desire to get rich trumps periodic downturns in the economy. And few though they may be, there are financial wizards with the acumen to make money.
Other people's money entrusted to them tends to at least double. Alas, honesty isn't the strong point of all of them -- clearly not of Parker Bennett in this story. With US$5 billion in hand, he disappears. Suicide is indicated, but nobody is found. A massive search is unavailing. Even the FBI is stumped.
Big Apple interior decorator Lane Harmon is at work redoing the spacious Bennett family residence in New Jersey. In the process, she and Parker's son Eric become romantically involved. How could a nice young man like that be the scion of such a scoundrel? His mum believes the whole thing no more than a misunderstanding.
After two years and cosmetic surgery, Parker shows up under an assumed name. To Lane's shock, Eric was his accomplice. But instead of sharing the cache, she witnesses father and son fighting to the death over all of it. She is shot. The saving grace is that a lawman has become infatuated with her.
Clark doesn't pad or go in for long description, yet her characters and locales manage to assume three dimensions. There are crooked fund handlers, several giving the rest a bad name. Read the newspapers. Higgins does.
The Melody Lingers On
by Mary Higgins Clark
Simon and Schuster
262pp
Available at Asia Books and other leading bookshops
325 baht
Ghost Flight
by Bear Grylls
Orion
451pp
Available at Asia Books and other leading bookshops
395 baht
