Review of Bill Brown’s Winner Lose All…
(William F. Brown, Winner Lose All, ASIN B00CEOKUR8)
Eyes play an important role in Bill Brown’s historical thriller and romance, Winner Lose All. It’s his third historical novel; I reviewed his first for Bookpleasures. Except for the fact that they take place during and after the final days of WW II, they are not related. For the historical thriller part, here we have OSS spy Edward Scanlon, with the penetrating gray eyes, traveling to Leipzig and honing his spy skills with NKVD agent Hanni Steiner, a bright blue-eyed blond, whose allegiance is to a new Germany, her father, and Beria, the Russian spy-master.
Scanlon is captured and tortured. Hanni helps him escape and flee the country. From that moment, the OSS agent finds that he can trust no one—not the British, not the Americans, and certainly not the Russians or Nazis. His second OSS mission, handled personally by Allen Dulles, is to obtain the plans and personnel associated with the Nazi experimental program to develop a new jet fighter, its prototype already playing havoc with the Allied bomber squadrons. Stalin also wants those plans and personnel, so Hanni is given the same mission.
I’ll not spoil the rest of this thrilling story nor give away the poignant ending, but let me say there is also plenty of romance here in the relationship between Scanlon and Hanni. I first thought that much of the dialog and description here was a bit schmaltzy, but I then thought back to those old classic films. Yes, they talked like that back then. Men wooed women and suffered in silence too, from Romeo and Juliet to Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca (that movie plot is similar, in fact). This is great stuff. I’m a sucker for it, although I don’t read many war stories anymore (and certainly can’t write them).
My one historical nit to pick: Allen Dulles might have been a brilliant chess master in the OSS and early CIA, but he and his brother’s paranoia toward world communism (partly justified, of course), as exported by the Soviet Union, definitely led to some bad choices. One of these, the overthrow of the duly-elected government of Iran and the installation of the Shah, still haunts us. Other gaffes in South America make it hard for me to put him on a pedestal as is done in this book, the last scenes of which take place in 1959, after that Iranian overthrow. This is an insignificant item, however, within the broad landscape painted in the book.
This is the best book I’ve read so far this year. In fact, it goes in the list on my webpage “Steve’s Bookshelf” in the “Stealth Reads—Books by New and Promising Authors” category, although Mr. Brown is certainly not a new author. He has confirmed his subgenre-niche in writing this excellent historical thriller. I hope he continues to keep writing them.
(Mr. Brown kindly provided me this ebook in return for an honest review.)
In libris libertas….
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