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The Darkest Hour

A Novel

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

A crackling, highly imaginative thriller debut in the vein of W.E.B. Griffin and Philip Kerr, set in German-occupied London at the close of World War II, in which a hardened British detective jeopardizes his own life to save an innocent soul and achieve the impossible—redemption.

London, 1946. The Nazis have conquered the British, and now occupy Great Britain, using brutality and fear to control its citizens. John Henry Rossett, a decorated British war hero and former police sergeant, has been reassigned to the Office of Jewish Affairs. He now answers to the SS, one of the most powerful and terrifying organizations in the Third Reich.

Rossett is a man accustomed to obeying commands, but he’s now assigned a job he did not ask for—and cannot refuse: rounding up Jews for deportation, including men and women he’s known his whole life. But they are not the only victims, for the war took Rossett’s wife and son, and shattered his own humanity.

Then he finds Jacob, a young Jewish child, hiding in an abandoned building, who touches something in Rossett that he thought was long dead.

Determined to save the innocent boy, Rossett takes him on the run, with the Nazis in pursuit. But they are not the only hunters following his trail. The Royalist Resistance and the Communists want him, too. Each faction has its own agenda, and Rossett will soon learn that none of them can be trusted . . . and all of them are deadly. 

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 11, 2014
      British author Schumacher makes his debut with this uneven alternative history set in Nazi-occupied Britain in 1946. Det. Sgt. John Henry Rossett, whom Churchill once dubbed “The British Lion” for holding up “half a Panzer brigade on his own for almost a week” and other heroic feats in France, has for the last two years personally supervised the rounding-up of thousands of Jews in London. He’s tormented by his role in fulfilling the SS’s cruel directives and haunted by the deaths of his family in a bombing—and by how far he’s fallen from his days as a copper, known as the “straightest man in the Met.” He gets a shot at redemption when a tip from one of his detainees, Israel Galkoff, leads him to where Galkoff’s grandson, Jacob, is in hiding and Rossett resolves to save the boy. Readers should be prepared for less sophisticated world-building than can be found in similar books by Len Deighton and Robert Harris. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates.

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  • English

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