Jill Hutchinson's Reviews > Fatherland

Since history is so interesting I often wonder why I pick up a a"what if" book based on a mix of fact and fiction. But after seeing some good reviews on this book, I thought I would give it a chance and am glad that I did.

Basically the story is a police procedural but it is set in a Europe which is now under Nazi rule. It is set in 1964 and Europe is preparing to celebrate Hitler's 74th birthday. Xavier March is an officer in the Kripo, a police unit one step below the Gestapo and is called to the scene of an apparent suicide of a former Nazi high official. It becomes obvious to him that this is not a suicide but a murder. This discovery leads him to other suspicious deaths of Nazi elite and straight into big trouble. I don't want to give away too much of the complex plot since it would involve too many spoilers. I will only say that Officer March finds information that would throw the world into chaos and expose the horrors of the Holocaust among other incidents.

The author paints a believable picture of what Europe would look like if the Nazi's had won the war and how German society would have evolved. The city of Berlin is shown exactly as Albert Speer had designed it when the Nazi's had been the victors of WWII. He also explains in his Afterword, that the book uses, for the most part, characters who actually existed and their biographical details are correct up to 1942. Their subsequent fates were different and he describes each.

This is a fascinating book, well written, and believable. Recommended.