The Secret of Spandau

May 16, 2016
At the start of Lovesey’s gripping thriller, first published in 1986 under his Peter Lear alias, Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich, parachutes into Scotland on a one-man peace mission on May 10, 1941. Flash forward to 1984, a few months after Hess turns 90 in West Berlin’s Spandau Prison, where he’s been serving a life sentence for war crimes since 1947. A team of British journalists are looking into the truth behind his defection; their editor believes that their own government may have hidden reasons for insisting on Hess’s continued incarceration. The reporters, including deputy sports editor Dick Garrick, get wind of a scandal that would totally revise public perceptions of Great Britain’s posture during WWII—that British officials conducted secret peace initiatives with the Nazis early in the war. Garrick and the others pursue this theory at their peril. Lovesey (Another One Goes Tonight and 15 other Peter Diamond mysteries) does a good job suspending disbelief while he keeps the pages turning. Agent: Jane Gelfman, Gelfman Schneider.

December 15, 2000
In May 1941, Hitler's Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess, parachuted from his Messerschmidt and fell to earth near Glasgow, Scotland. Hess claimed he had come to negotiate peace between England and Germany. That much is true; what happens next in this well-researched novel (originally published in England in 1986 but appearing in the U.S. for the first time) is very plausible fiction. The bulk of the story is set in the mid-1980s when Hess, now an elderly man, is the only surviving prisoner in Spandau Prison. Only Hess knows the real reason for his flight to Glasgow in 1941, and he's kept the facts to himself. But now a manuscript, supposedly written by Hess in the 1960s, has come to light, and a publisher is threatening to rush it into print. Meanwhile, a maverick newspaper reporter, Red Goodbody, is hot on a story that may prove Hess was not looking for peace at all, that he was working with a group of British citizens to sell out their own country. A thought-provoking, entirely believable novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)