From Publishers Weekly
In this aptly titled thriller, Llewellyn (Clawhammer) proves that you can flirt with several genres at once and still deliver a gritty, intelligent and original read. Narrator Fred Hope is a British former environmental activist who once went to jail for trying to stop a whale hunt; during that same exploit, his patrician wife, Helen, was paralyzed for life. Now Fred's Uncle Ernie, an unrepentant Communist, has been framed for arms smuggling, and his partner and stepbrother-in-law, Hugo, has hired out Fred's charter cruise boat for, of all things, a whaling expedition. This ruins Fred's reputation-but it gets worse: Hugo's client turns out to be the godson of Herman Goring and the leader of a neo-Nazi group called "Midgard," while one of the client's associates happens to have information proving that Hugo is a direct descendant of Czar Nicholas II. Gradually, Fred discovers evidence of a conspiracy stretching back to the youth of Uncle Ernie, whose story is told in a series of flashbacks. Though the novel begins slowly, it soon picks up as Llewellyn combines a number of story types-sea saga, mystery, family drama, social history, thriller, character study-into an amalgam not easily categorized. The resolution of the complicated plot is wildly unexpected, a punchy ending for a strong, well-written novel that's something far different, and far better, than the average thriller.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Jonathon Oliver's facility with accents works to good advantage in this tale of international gun-running, whale hunting, contemporary Nazis, and lost Imperial Russian treasure. While Oliver's accents are dead-on, enhancing the multinational nature of the characters, the enunciation is such that the words remain clear while retaining a foreign flavor. D.T.H. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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