Double Cross Blind
Joel N. Ross
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 Doubleday
ISBN: 0385513887

December 1941 London, a Nazi spy with evidence that will take down a network of double agents, defects.

At the start of the war a German spy ring in England, called the Abwehr was turned, agent by agent. Run by the British MI6, & called the Twenty Committee. The double cross. XX. Now it is in danger of exposure by a super spy hunting for those traitors. All it will take is one coded transmission from this super spy, Duckblind, whom no one has ever seen, & the whole system, both in England & on the Continent, will be slaughtered.

Sondegger with his hypnotic voice & mesmerizing personality, able to read people in seconds, with not an iota of compunction or compassion, has given himself up to the British, & is willing to barter his vital information with only one person... Tommy Wall... the brother of his erstwhile connection Earl, married to the daughter of a British aristocrat, a BUFfer sympathizer & Hitler admirer.

Tom Hall had driven up to Canada at the start of the War to join up. With the rank of sargeant from his previous military experience, he was shipped off to Crete to hold the island along with the Kiwis, the brave New Zealanders. All was lost when thousands of German troops parachuted in, & the British never sent relief.

Wounded, shellshocked, & recovering at the Rowansea mental asylum, Tom hasn't slept in weeks, has a badly healing hand & a severe case of guilt over losing all his men. Now he's determined to find his brother, because he knows Earl betrayed his unit on Crete. He knows his own brother is a turncoat.

That's when MI6 recruits him to pretend to be Earl & convince Sondegger, who has never met Earl, to reveal how & where he's going to transmit his intelligence to Germany.

Into the mix comes Harriet, Tom's first love whom his brother stole away & married. She briefs the women spies before they head off into the front lines. & then there's Audrey, a resourceful girl at Earl's nightclub.

Double Cross Blind is as atmospheric as any Ken Follett thriller, rich in what living in London, the British class system, fashion, nightclubs, politics & travel was like during World War II. It also pits the three cultures of Germany, Britain & the USA against each other.

If you like WWII tales of derring-do (based on actual events) & complicated espionage, weighted with the conundrum of having special knowledge about something that's going to happen which everybody considers preposterous, then you're going to be totally enthralled. I was!
(09/25/05)

Rebecca