BOOK REVIEW: Black Cross

Greg Iles books are consistently filled with edge-of-the-seat action and page-turning plots. I just finished one of his earlier books, Black Cross and I was exhausted by the time we had wiped out that Nazi camp.

Mark has just buried the grandparents who had raised him when an elderly rabbi came to the house to tell him the story of his grandfather’s secret role during the Second World War. What followed was an adventure that took us all on a breath-holding ride.

In Oxford University in 1944, Mark McConnell and his brother David are having a drink at the local pub. David has joined the British war effort as a fighter pilot.

Mark is a pacifist who wants nothing to do with the war. His medical degree combined with his degree in chemistry has made him important to the research that England is doing on nerve gasses. Evidence has been found that Germany has developed a gas that is deadlier than anything that has been used in the past. The Nazi commanders will have it ready for the Allied invasion at Normandy.

Mark is having trouble with his involvement in the research that could be responsible for millions of deaths. 

 

Meanwhile, Jonas Stern, a German Jew who has become a Zionist guerrilla fighter, has been arrested for crimes against His Majesty’s British forces in Palestine. Several of the British officers see Stern’s hatred of the Nazis as something that can be put to their use.

After some devious maneuvering, Mark and Jonas find themselves on a secret mission to a concentration camp deep within Germany where this new gas is being developed and tested on the prisoners of the camp.

With scenes from the camp as well as the preparation to capture the laboratory and a sample of the gas, Black Cross is an adventure story that will completely capture you.

Two things, besides his ability to craft a plot, make Iles one of my favorite authors. He develops characters that I can care about. Even his minor characters stay with you. That is important to me.

His surprising talent is his perfect use of language. He captures the speech pattern of his varied people in a way to make them believable, but more impressive are his descriptions that can be poetic. Here is how Mark tells of walking through Belgium and France years after the First World War:

He had stood awhile above the intermingled regiments of bones resting fitfully in shallow graves beneath the soil. And there, in whispers just beneath the wind that howled across the stark terrain, he heard the puzzled voices of boys who had never known the inside of a woman, who never had children, who had never grown old. Seven million voices asking in unison the unanswerable question that was an answer in itself:  

Why?

The Author's Notes thoroughly explain the use of nerve gas, an implement of war still being used today.  Greg Iles continues to make the case that there is nothing about war that is romantic.