James R Benn – On Desperate Ground
I was driving to Adelaide and back in mid February 2016 and needed an audiobook that would help me pass the 16+hours of driving. I found this one in the Moreland Library audiobook section and thought it sounded good. I generally like Nazi/WWII books and this looked promising. Blurb:
ON DESPERATE GROUND is the story of men and women caught up in the death throes of Nazi Germany, struggling to maintain those things precious to them-life, an end to killing, and even sanity itself. Colonel Johann Faust has lost everyone he ever loved and feels he is going inexorably insane. He hears the haunting voice of his dead fiancée and the demons that roar through his mind as he perfects a plan to save Nazi Germany from defeat and insure a greater and deadlier new world war. Captain Dieter Neukirk, once a protégé of Faust's, is more concerned with saving the lives of his remaining men than in sacrificing them in a fanatical last stand. Meanwhile, Elsa Klein, Dieter's lover and the chief social worker at a Berlin hospital, is engaged in her own dangerous work, providing medical care and identity papers to hidden Jews in the city. American Captain Mack Mackenzie, pulled from a military hospital before his wounds are healed, is assigned to investigate reports of a secret Nazi operation. Wanting only to make it home alive, Mack finds himself in a life and death struggle with unlikely allies and a ferociously determined opponent. Americans and Germans alike are drawn to a hilltop in the remote German countryside, where they find themselves between powerful armies and forced into a terrible decision that could end one war or begin a new one.
Well,it certainly lived up to expectations. I had never heard of James Benn before but I was impressed. This review by Ben Pastor, author of The Water Thief, sums it up nicely.
“A tight-paced adventure, a multilayered set of events, where strategy, internecine conflict, and private rivalries are contained within...a 1945 large-scale German operation...The beat, the quick tempo never lets the reader down...A very good novel, and great reading entertainment.”
I later found out that Benn has written 10 books in a WWII Billy Boyle series. I was very impressed with his vast knowledge of WWII. That in itself makes for a very enjoyable "listen".
