The Enemy of My Enemy: A Clandestine Operations Novel

It’s the spring of 1946 in bestseller Griffin and son Butterworth’s tight fifth Clandestine Operations novel (after 2017’s Death at Nuremberg), and two top SS leaders, Franz von Dietelburg and Wilhelm Burgdorf, have been imprisoned for a wide variety of crimes, among them the massacre of slave laborers at Peenemünde, the site of the German rocket laboratories during WWII. Dietelburg and Burgdorf are also suspected of being involved in Odessa, a secret organization of former SS personnel whose mission is smuggling Nazis out of Germany. After the duo escapes, the job of hunting them down falls to Capt. Jim Cronley, an agent in the Directorate of Central Intelligence, the successor to the Office of Strategic Services. Cronley flies from Argentina to Nuremberg with a large contingent of helpers to pursue the escaped Nazis. They also get on the trail of a fortune stashed away by Heinrich Himmler in the hope of financing a Fourth Reich. Newcomers will find this a good entry point, and regular readers will be pleased that the authors have avoided the long-winded prose that’s marred recent entries in the series. Agent: Robert Youdelman, Rember & Curtis. (Dec.)