This engrossing follow-up to The Advocate, Mesce's award-winning first novel about army lawyer Maj. Henry Voss's exploits during WWII, picks up where the previous story ended, in August 1943. The members of Voss's team have been split up: Peter Ricks is in Italy, the universally disliked Armando Grassi is in Greenland, and Voss himself has been sent back to America as a bribe for his silence. When Grassi's body is found in the Orkney Islands, Voss agrees to help Captain Woody Kneece of Washington's Criminal Investigation Corps in his investigation. Together they follow the dead man's trail from Greenland, where they discover evidence of a series of off-the-books contraband flights, to the Orkney estate of Sir John Duff—member of the pro-Hitler Cliveden set, personal friend of the Duke of Windsor—who is attended by the unctuous personal secretary, Gordon Fordyce. There's a dogged realism to Voss and Kneece's attempts to worry the truth from people who have every reason to lie and every reason to expect that their class and station protects them; there's realism, too, in the period details—the danger of air travel, the raw terror of a terrified soldier in Italy. The main characters are well developed, and while there are clichés in the plotline they don't overshadow the rest of the book. As in The Advocate
(which Mesce co-wrote with Steve Szilagyi), the novel is ostensibly narrated by jaded British reporter Eddie Owen, and the interspersed first person sections make the story feel like an old man's memories of a time long past. This adds yet another layer of realism to a well-crafted thriller. (Sept. 4)
