Germanica

Alternate historian Conroy (Liberty: 1784) delivers a new and intriguing novel that takes the final days of the Third Reich as its jumping-off point. Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for Hitler’s declining empire, goes into hiding in an Alpine redoubt to wait out the last attempt by the Allies to end the war, hoping to establish the new Nazi state of Germanica. A stalwart trio of Allies—American soldier Scott Tanner, Czech escapee Lena Bobekova, and OSS officer Ernie Janek—try to stamp out this continuation of the regime. Conroy captures the intricacies of WWII with an eye for historical nuance, and he crafts a believable alternate ending to the war. But his heroes and villains can be one-dimensional, which sometimes makes it difficult to differentiate among the various characters, and the narrative points of view are not always clearly delineated. An improbable late development involving a group of Holocaust survivors may also raise some eyebrows. In spite of these drawbacks, the story is buoyed by Conroy’s effective snapshot of the era. [em]Agent: Eleanor Wood, Spectrum Literary. (Sept.) [/em]