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Search - A Gathering of Saints
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A Gathering of Saints Author: |
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Book Information
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Other Versions of this Book: Hardcover, Audio Cassette (Abridged), Audio Cassette (Multitrack)
Book Description:
Riveting in intensity, A GATHERING OF SAINTS defies belief - yet the characters, the crimes, the lies, the treachery, and the terror portrayed here are based on true but secret episodes from the dark early hours of the Second World War.
At summer's end in 1940, London skies turn war-black as Hitler's airborne hordes begin the Blitz. From the bustling working-class East End to the Underground Stations at Charing Cross and Leicester Square, lethal Nazi Flammenbomben transform the city into a cauldron of human suffering. Against this terrifying scene, a lone psychopath plays his own ghastly game, stalking individual victims and killing them with methodical precision. Probing the murders is Detective Inspector Morris Black of Scotland Yard, a middle-aged Jewish widower gifted with an uncanny ability to divine the truth of a crime from the most meager evidence. As Black tracks his man - whom he dubs Queer Jack - from corpse to corpse, he discovers that each victim was killed at the site of a devastating Luftwaffe raid, only hours before the raid occurred! Black soon learns how explosive his discovery is when he is summoned into Churchill's Magic Circle - the supersecret group of officers, politicians, and spies desperate to draw the United States into war despite rumors that American ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and his British allies want a separate peace with Hitler. Churchill's men tell Black that British intelligence has cracked "Ultra," the Nazi military code. The secret must be kept from the Nazis - even if it means allowing thousands to be killed in cities the Magic Circle knows are about to be bombed. An even worse truth is revealed to Black - a Nazi spy in Britain, known to Intelligence as The Doctor, is probably on the trail of Queer Jack too. Somehow, the murderer knows the Ultra secret. If The Doctor finds him first, the Nazis will know that their code has been broken, and Britain could lose the war.
At summer's end in 1940, London skies turn war-black as Hitler's airborne hordes begin the Blitz. From the bustling working-class East End to the Underground Stations at Charing Cross and Leicester Square, lethal Nazi Flammenbomben transform the city into a cauldron of human suffering. Against this terrifying scene, a lone psychopath plays his own ghastly game, stalking individual victims and killing them with methodical precision. Probing the murders is Detective Inspector Morris Black of Scotland Yard, a middle-aged Jewish widower gifted with an uncanny ability to divine the truth of a crime from the most meager evidence. As Black tracks his man - whom he dubs Queer Jack - from corpse to corpse, he discovers that each victim was killed at the site of a devastating Luftwaffe raid, only hours before the raid occurred! Black soon learns how explosive his discovery is when he is summoned into Churchill's Magic Circle - the supersecret group of officers, politicians, and spies desperate to draw the United States into war despite rumors that American ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and his British allies want a separate peace with Hitler. Churchill's men tell Black that British intelligence has cracked "Ultra," the Nazi military code. The secret must be kept from the Nazis - even if it means allowing thousands to be killed in cities the Magic Circle knows are about to be bombed. An even worse truth is revealed to Black - a Nazi spy in Britain, known to Intelligence as The Doctor, is probably on the trail of Queer Jack too. Somehow, the murderer knows the Ultra secret. If The Doctor finds him first, the Nazis will know that their code has been broken, and Britain could lose the war.
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Lorinda B. (From Publishers Weekly
A maniacal serial killer known as Queer Jack stalks London during the dark days of the Blitz, engaging the pursuit not only of Scotland Yard but of a highly placed German spy known as The Doctor. That's the premise behind Hyde's densely atomospheric new thriller, his latest after Hard Target (1990). Detective Inspector Morris Black, widowed, brilliant, introspective and Jewish, is "seconded" to MI5 for the duration of the murder investigation. Black's diggings must remain top-secret, because the killer always commits his grisly crimes in locations that are immediately bombed by the Germans. While Black deducts from the evidence and reviews his own haunted past, London turns to smoking ash around him. Meanwhile, a host of additional characters impedes his progress, most notably Katherine Copeland, a volatile American journalist-cum-spy whose assignment is to seduce Black and who ends up getting in the way at the most extraordinary moments. Hyde's scrupulous research and deep knowledge of the political realities surrounding the Blitz make his story utterly convincing, though at times the generous detail grows so thick that it chokes the narrative like a kudzu vine. The procedural elements are perfect, however, with scenes of ghastly carnage rendered so crisply that one can almost smell the fear and death. The final pages, in which Black, The Doctor and the forces of MI5 inevitably converge upon Jack, contain images of gore and tormented madness that can't soon be forgotten. Readers who relish the raw truth of human, and inhuman, history will find here what they are looking for.
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