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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jun 1999, 340 pages
Paperback:
May 2000, 432 pages
It's November 1942. War is raging in Europe. The invasion of North Africa has begun. In Washington, OSS chief William J. Donovan finds himself fighting a rear-guard battle against an unexpected enemy: the rival intelligence chiefs back home.
Griffin's fans did indeed cheer the rediscovery of his Men at War series, his epic of
espionage and battle originally published under the pen name Alex Baldwin and never before
available in hardcover. Said Kirkus Reviews, "This is shrewd, sharp, rousing
entertainment."
As The Soldier Spies opens, it is November 1942. War is raging in Europe. The invasion
of North Africa has begun. In Washington, OSS chief William J. Donovan finds himself
fighting a rear-guard battle against an unexpected enemy: the rival intelligence chiefs
back home. In Morocco, Second Lieutenant Eric Fulmar waits in the desert for a car
containing two top-level defectors--or will it be full of SS men instead? In England,
Major Richard Canidy gets the mission of his life: to penetrate into the heart of Germany
and bring out the man with the secret of the jet engine, before the Germans grab hold of
him first. The only hope? An experimental pilotless flying bomb. Or at least that's what a
lieutenant named Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., thinks....
Everywhere adventure crackles, fueled by the narrative realism, rich characters, and
that special flair for the military heart and mind that have always made Griffin's novels
so popular. The Soldier Spies is further proof that "Griffin rates among the best
storytellers in any genre" (Phoenix Gazette).
Chapter One
Marburg an der Lahn, Germany 8 November 1942
On the night of November 7, Obersturmführer-SS-SD Wilhelm Peis, a tall, pale, blond
man of twenty-eight, who was the senior Sicherheitsdienst (SS Security Service) officer in
Marburg an der Lahn, received the following message by Teletype from Berlin:
YOU WILL PLEASE TAKE ALL NECESSARY STEPS TO ENSURE THE SECURITY OF REICHSMINISTER
ALBERT SPEER AND A PERSONAL STAFF OF FOUR WHO WILL MAKE AN UNPUBLICIZED VISIT TO THE
FULMAR ELEKTRISCHES WERK AT MARBURG 8 NOVEMBER. THE REICHSMINISTER WILL ARRIVE BY PRIVATE
TRAIN AT 10:15 AND DEPART IN THE SAME MANNER AT APPROXIMATELY 15:45.
The message from Berlin seemed more or less routine to Peis, and he at first treated it
as such until early in the morning of the eighth when Gauleiter Karl-Heinz Schroeder--in a
state somewhere between chagrin and panic--burst into Peis's sleeping quarters (Peis was
not in fact asleep) and ...
Tom Clancy
A storyteller in the grand tradition, probably the best man around for describing the military community.
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