Tag: historical thriller

Book Review – The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor @vintagebooks

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About the Book

Front cover of The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O'Connor

February 1944. Six months since Nazi forces occupied Rome. Inside the beleaguered city, the Contessa Giovanna Landini is a member of the band of Escape Line activists known as ‘The Choir’. Their mission is to smuggle refugees to safety and help Allied soldiers, all under the nose of Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann.

During a ferocious morning air raid a mysterious parachutist lands in Rome and disappears into the backstreets. Is he an ally or an imposter? His fate will come to put the whole Escape Line at risk.

Meanwhile, Hauptmann’s attention has landed on the Contessa. As his fascination grows, she is pulled into a dangerous game with him – one where the consequences could be lethal.

Format: Hardcover (384 pages) Publisher: Harvill Secker
Publication date: 30th January 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The Ghosts of Rome is the second book in the author’s Rome Escape Line trilogy. I loved My Father’s House but, if that’s possible, I loved this one even more. As before, the book has a wonderful cast of characters. (Many of them were real people who committed acts of the utmost bravery as part of the actual Choir.)

The author brings each character brilliantly to life, in particular through the invented transcripts of interviews recorded twenty years after the events, allowing us to hear the distinctive voices the author has created for them. For example, the acerbic wit and Irish lilt of diplomat’s wife, Delia Kiernan (my favourite) or the Cockney accent and sardonic asides of John May.

As the book opens, Gestapo chief Paul Hauptmann is under increasing pressure from Berlin to bring an end to the activities of ‘The Choir’ and capture the escaped Allied prisoners hidden in places across Rome and in the Vatican City itself. Not only is his career on the line but the lives of his wife and daughters too, removed for ‘safe keeping’ by Himmler. Increasingly he tries to justify his own actions: the brutal interrogation of prisoners, the meticulous drawing up of death lists for savage reprisals. ‘Important to push away weakness. Too far along the road. Sometimes a man of peace must perform terrible duties, he tells himself. I had to do what I did, there was no other choice.’ And he has become obsessed with one particular member of the Choir, Contessa Giovanna Landini (known as Jo to her comrades).

Having taken possession of her palazzo, he wanders its corridors admiring her furniture, selecting paintings he thinks Hitler might appreciate, examining her extensive wardrobe and choosing gowns to send to his wife Elise in a vain attempt to win back her favour. (He’s almost certain she’s being unfaithful.) He raids the Contessa’s wine cellar, listens to her records, examines her books and takes midnight strolls in her garden. ‘She feels close to him here – every garden is a portrait of its owner.’ Most creepily of all, he takes to sleeping in her bed.

For The Choir, operating the escape line has become a cat and mouse game but one in which there are thousands of Nazi cats for every mouse. No mercy is shown to those who harbour escapees, there are tempting rewards for those prepared to inform and harsh reprisals on the population of Rome for German soldiers killed in acts of resistance. Add to this Allied bombing raids, food and fuel shortages, and Rome has become a very uncomfortable place in which to live.

The Choir’s missions outside the Vatican have become increasingly dangerous and the burden of responsibility for so many lives is huge. There are escapees hidden in every nook and cranny of Rome: abandoned buildings, crawl spaces, cellars, tunnels, even catacombs. It weighs on all the members of The Choir, but particularly on Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty whom the others look to for guidance. He is physically and mentally exhausted, and finding less and less solace in prayer. ‘Pallid, puff-eyed, watchful, uncombed, he has started to acquire the aura of a man who lives in shadow.’ No wonder, with a bounty on his head. As he confides to Jo, ‘I’m lately on a mission into a shadowy old dungeon – my head – to rescue a beaten-down prisoner – my soul.’

Like My Father’s House, the book combines thrilling action scenes that are full of tension with wonderful writing. There’s also an intriguing sub-plot involving an injured airman that explores the sort of moral dilemmas members of The Choir face. Is saving the life of one man worth endangering the lives of others, including your comrades? Can you live with yourself if you turn away and do nothing?

By the end of the book we know, sadly, there are characters we won’t meet again. But the work must go on because the Nazis are not yet defeated and a savage beast is often most dangerous when cornered.

I found The Ghosts of Rome an utterly compelling historical thriller, full of tension and authentic detail. Although I shall be sorry for the series to end, at the same time I cannot wait for the final book.

In three words: Gripping, suspenseful, immersive

About the Author

Author Joseph O'Connor

Joseph O’Connor’s fiction has been published in forty languages. His twenty books include eleven novels, among them the million-selling Star of the Sea, Ghost Light, Shadowplay and My Father’s House, a Washington Post Book of the Year. His work has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award, twice for the Whitbread/Costa and twice for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and has won the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, France’s Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi and Premio Napoli, an American Library Association Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Hennessey Writer of the Year and Hall of Fame Awards, the Eason/An Post Novel of the Year Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Prix Madeline Zepter for European Novel of the Year. He is Frank McCourt Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

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Book Review – Dead Ground by Graham Hurley @AriesFiction @Seasidepicture @soph_ransompr

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Blog tour banner for Dead Ground by Graham Hurley

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Dead Ground by Graham Hurley, published today by Aries Fiction. My thanks to Poppy at Ransom PR for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Head of Zeus for my digital review copy via NetGalley.

About the Book

1936. Anglo-Breton translator Annie Wrenne is working in Madrid when the Spanish Civil War breaks out. Annie becomes a nurse on the front line, but after falling in love with a patient, she ends up pregnant – and abandoned – by a man she thought she knew.

Annie passes the rest of the war in a haze, her only consolation her relationship with mysterious Republican fighter Carlos Ortega. Annie finds herself caught up in Ortega’s world, a web of intrigue, which leads to her recruitment into MI5.

On her first mission, Annie must pose as Ortega’s wife and head to Algeciras. Hitler’s Operation Felix – his plan to control the Mediterranean and force Churchill to the negotiating table – has been set into motion, and the ‘couple’ must help prevent the Nazis from seizing Gibraltar.

But Ortega has secretly been working for the Nationalists, part of Madrid’s Fifth Column. If it falls to Annie – and Ortega – to save the day for the Allied cause, can she trust a man who has changed sides yet again?

Format: Hardback (400 pages) Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 4th July 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction, Thriller

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My Review

Dead Ground is the ninth book in the ‘Spoils of War’ collection. The books do not run chronologically, instead each one focuses on a key event in the run-up to or during WW2, spanning the period from 1936 to the last days of the war. This non-sequential structure means books can be read in any order or as standalones. Having said that, some characters feature in multiple books, including Tam Moncrieff and Annie Wrenne who have key roles in Dead Ground. There’s also a walk-on part for a character from Last Flight to Stalingrad that neatly foreshadows his role in that book.

Annie has developed a deep love of Spain and its culture, especially the work of Goya. She is dismayed by the Spain she finds now that Franco has gained power, a Spain she almost doesn’t recognize. And in Madrid the scars of the vicious civil war are all too obvious. ‘When she’d first arrived… it had been full of promise. Now, years later, it was a grotesque shadow of its former self, an assortment of ruined buildings, feral dogs, starving kids and hospitals bursting with unfinished business.’

In a way, Admiral Canaris shares Annie’s sense of disillusionment. He has grown disgusted by what Germany has become under Adolf Hitler and appalled by the unnecessary savagery being inflicted on the population of countries overrun by the Nazis. He is concerned too at the growing influence of Himmler’s SS which threatens his own Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence organisation. Therefore he has an interest in attempting to restrain Hitler’s wilder schemes. One such is the capture of Gibraltar, the success of which depends on the support of Franco, a notoriously difficult man to pin down. Canaris’s actions place him in a risky situation – fatally risky, as history will bear out.

Naturally the British objective is also to prevent the capture of Gibraltar, a place of great strategic value. It starts a cat-and-mouse game in which each sides seeks to influence events using all the assets at their disposal. Key to this is intelligence which is where Tam Moncrieff and Annie Wrenne come in. Tam recruits Annie, a fluent Spanish speaker, to gather information from foreign journalists based in Madrid. She comes up trumps with one particular piece of information that could change the tide of events – but will it, and does everyone actually want it to?

The author has a brilliant knack for taking real historical events, crafting a tautly plotted thriller around them and peopling it with an interesting mix of real and fictional characters. A history ‘lesson’, if you like, but in an easily digestible form. The standout character for me was the enigmatic Carlos Ortega, a skilled sniper severely facially disfigured in the civil war. Annie’s first encounter with Ortega comes just at the point where she has been cruelly betrayed by someone she thought she knew and could trust. Yet her kindness towards Ortega shows she retains an innate sense of empathy for others. Theirs becomes a partnership that you suspect might have become something more under different circumstances.

Dead Ground is a gripping historical thriller with twists and turns aplenty. I can’t wait to see where and when Graham Hurley takes us next.

In three words: Compelling, pacy, suspenseful
Try something similar: City of Spies by Mara Timon

About the Author

Author Graham Hurley

Graham Hurley is a documentary-maker and novelist. For the last two decades he’s written full-time, penning nearly fifty books. Two made the shortlist for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Award Crime Novel of the Year, while Finisterre – the first in the Spoils of War collection – was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Award. 

Graham lives in East Devon with wife, Lin. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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