The Sands of Sakkara

""Fate's a funny thing, Colonel,"" muses newshound Frank Carney to an aging war hero--a motto that could serve as an epigraph to this leisurely, Casablancan thriller about a Nazi plot to assassinate FDR and Winston Churchill in Cairo. In the summer of 1939, Jack Halder (son of ""a beautiful New York socialite mother and a wealthy Prussian father with a renowned passion for ancient Egypt"") and his best friend, Harry Weaver (who grew up as the child of caretakers on Mrs. Halder's estate), meet at Sakkara, an exciting archeological dig just south of Cairo. Among Sakkara's charms is the half-Jewish German archeologist Rachel Stern. The love triangle's potential divisiveness is sidetracked by the announcement that Germany has invaded Poland. The threesome reunites in the fall of 1943, when a Nazi general sends Halder, who, though American-born, is a German citizen and secret agent, two SS officers and Rachel (as insurance) to pave the way for a commando raid that will kill the Allied leaders. Headstrong, na ve American intelligence officer Lt.-Col. Harry Weaver is dispatched to thwart their plans. Despite an overwhelmingly detailed narrative rife with spies, kidnappings, black marketers and aerial dogfights, there's little suspense in either the love story or the assassination attempt. Weaver and Halder always choose friendship over duty, and while their shared passion for Rachel may blind them, it never drives a wedge between them. The neatly turned final twist--specialty of the bestselling Meade (Brandenburg)--resolves the romantic competition over Rachel for good, though the flash-forward of the last pages reopens the question of the epic friendship between Jack and Harry. The conclusion of the political risk the thriller imagines is, of course, foregone with Roosevelt's death in 1945. For all this, the Nazi-heavy plot and its Hollywood-exotic Egyptian backdrop capture the softest part of the imagination, rendering the story absorbing if not challenging. (May)