From Amazon.com
It's remarkable that practicing lawyers such as Seattle's James Thayer find the time, not to mention the psychic energy, to write smashing, fact-packed thrillers like this top-drawer tale, in which a lone assassin is sent into Germany at the end of World War II by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to knock off Hitler. Unlike other "what if?" books such as
The Day of the Jackal, where readers know from the start that the plot to kill de Gaulle didn't succeed,
Five Past Midnight winds up in the ruins of Hitler's bunker, where the Nazi leader indeed met his end. Whether or not it was at the hands of American commando Jack Cray is up to readers to decide--and Thayer does his best to sway the jury in favor of his client. His last gripping thriller,
White Star, is out in paperback.
From Booklist
Worn out though it be, the action hero bestriding a cartoonish world is a versatile stock character with regular appeal--provided the antagonist is suitably bad. Thayer picks the baddest of the bad--Adolf Hitler in Berlin, 1945. On the flimsy rumor that Hitler will continue the war from the Alps, special forces assassin Jack Cray is dispatched to stop him. Any cement head can kill, but to do so with Cray's disguises and efficiency--with knives! guns! bare hands!--shows he's a pro that no Gestapo thugs could possibly stop. Their efforts are short hurdles that Cray overcomes in ever more spectacular fashion. Locked up in a POW prison? Escape by faking death. Approaching a roadblock? Hide in a beef carcass. Need a German uniform? A sniper rifle? Fake documents? Cray steals, with the occasional help of a spy, everything he needs in a series of scrapes and escapes as he closes on Hitler's bunker, where Cray's SS ally awaits. A silly beach-time diversion with the noisy explosiveness that more people ask for by name--Thayer.
Gilbert Taylor
