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New Year's night, 1945. A beautiful blue-eyed, dark-skinned woman, wearing fins and a wet suit, comes ashore on a deserted beach in Newburyport on Cape Cod. A civil defense watcher, sitting in a truck and trying to keep warm, sees her and is killed for her vigilance, as is her partner, patrolling on another part of the beach. The mysterious woman, Judith as she calls herself, goes into town and gets a car from her accomplice. Meanwhile, in St. Andrews, Scotland, Dr Mikhal Lammeck, an American citizen born in Czechoslovakia, is training men who will be dropped into occupied Burma to be saboteurs and killers of the enemy. One of the men he had trained earlier in the war, who had parachuted into France, comes to see him. 'Dag' Nabbit is now in the American Secret Service, guarding President Roosevelt. Nabbit asks Lammeck to return to the US on a top secret mission, one that only three or four other men know about. The double murder on the beach in Massachusetts has rung alarm bells among certain federal employes. Lammeck agrees under duress, and discovers that the mission is to try to find an assassin that no one is sure is really in the US. But, if there is one, then FDR's life may be in danger. And although Lammeck does not think FDR is a good man, he is the President and thereby deserves protection. I don't know why but I read this book all the way through, even though it was clear that nothing earth-shattering would happen. I suppose it is my age showing, but although this book is advertised as alternate history, it is nothing more than a didactic retelling of past events, with a couple of anachronisms added for flavor. (The wet suit was not invented until 1951). The descriptions of DC during the waning days of the war and the conditions of blacks in the South during this time were well done, though.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, November 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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