Five Past Midnight

Fans of Jack Higgins will devour this fast-paced thriller about Jack Cray, a lone American commando sent to assassinate Hitler in the waning days of WWII. The only man standing between him and the Fuhrer is Otto Dietrich, Berlin's finest detective, whose brother was implicated in the June 1944 attempt to kill Hitler. Freed from jail specifically for this assignment and kept on a short leash by the Gestapo, Dietrich tracks Cray from Colditz prison to the vividly realized chaos of bomb-ravaged Berlin and the bunker where Hitler has gone to ground. There's a love interest of course: Cray's Berlin contact is the beautiful Katrin von Tornitz, widow of yet another '44 conspirator. Even though Cray looks mean (and says things like ""`Don't talk to me. Just sit there and bleed'""), he spares the innocent whenever possible--and this Germany is full of innocents. Thayer (White Star) deliberately makes the Gestapo and the SS the only evil Germans; even Hitler--eyes ""milky blue, penetrating, yet at the same time warm and guileless""--comes off as a regular guy; he even shares knowing glances with the men he catches ogling Eva Braun. It makes for a surprisingly sunny atmosphere, where nobility wins out over nationalism every time. Historical matters aside, the only real lapse in verisimilitude is Cray's super-human resistance to pain: it's hard to worry about someone who can shake off dog bites and bayonet thrusts with invariable sangfroid. And Thayer's handling of Cray's escape from Colditz--setting it up, then showing him free before explaining how it was done--is duplicated in the climax, where a crucial plot point occurs offstage and is filled in only after the fact. It feels like cheating, and seems unworthy of a novel that is otherwise as fast and straightforward as a punch to the jaw. (Aug.)