Jane Street. One of those tony side streets in NYC’s Village
neighborhood. Everyone is rich, talented, beautiful, doesn't look their age. You know.
Fitz Donovan is a retired NYC police chief who now runs a mystery-themed bookstore. Wife died
10y ago. Daughter Maeve (who carries on the family trait of clairvoyance) and grand-daughter
Finn (trying to become a photographer) live with him. Another daughter, Rory
(former lawyer who now rehabs and flips homes), lives nearby.
Next door lives Ms. Wallenberg, an elderly lady who fled
Europe after the war. She says she wants to give Fitz something because she
knows he will know what to do with it. Two hours after she tells this to Fitz, she
is found murdered in her home. The police
are writing it off as a burglary gone bad.
But she was tortured, too. And by the looks of things, it
was done by a pro. The ex-cop in Fitz isn’t on the same page as the NYPD on
this one. And he finds a large envelope that had been tossed in his bushes. In
it is a journal that contains far more than just the day-to-day musings of an
old lady. It presents in considerable detail just how advanced German science
was in the days of Hitler. New physics. Concepts that are only now just being
unearthed, the Germans were way ahead back in the 1930s and 40s.
That Germany had brilliant scientists wasn’t lost on the OSS
and they started up Operation Paperclip that tracked down the major brains in
science, industry, banking, and more in order to secret them to the US and put
to work, mostly under new identities. Werner Von Braun of NASA was just the
most visible beneficiary of Paperclip.
Donovan recruits a number of NYC geniuses to help read,
interpret, and unravel all that Ms. Wallenberg and kept locked up in this
journal – they call themselves the Bleeker Street Irregulars. But their work doesn’t
go un-noticed. A cabal of former Nazis living in the US want them stopped
because the main secret is that it was a Hitler doppelganger who died in that
bunker and that Hitler’s bloodline is alive and well. Heads of finance and
industry can, with a lot of serious digging, be traced back to their Nazi
roots. And one is being nurtured by this gang to make a run at the White House.
If successful, the vision of the Third Reich will be realized.
Just a bit of a coincidence that I read two books about
modern day Nazis. The bulk of this book surrounds each of Donovan’s team as
they investigate a multitude of different arms of the conspiracy. And it’s
pretty clever, too. After about 2/3 of the book, I started to think that this
as the obvious Part 1 of a coming series about this one man’s push toward the
White House. Sort of like The Omen parts 1-3. You’ll have to decide. It IS the
beginning of a series of books about Donovan’s Bleeker Street Irregulars. Think
of this coming series as a modern take on Agatha Christie.
ECD
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