The Devil's Oasis
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- €3.49
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- €3.49
Publisher Description
BARTLE BULL
Author of the White Rhino Hotel
and A Café on the Nile
Continuing the epic African adventures of the characters memorably cast in
The White Rhino Hotel and A Cafe on the Nile.
All the treacherous intrigue of cosmopolitan Cairo and fiery drama of Rommel's desert war in Africa come vibrantly to life in this novel of historical adventure and romance.
It is 1942, and civilization as the world knows it teeters on its edge. Nazi Germany stands at the height of its power. In North Africa the brilliant General Rommel's panzers threaten the Suez Canal, the oil fields of the Middle East, and the trade route to Asia. To win Egypt, though, Rommel must first take the port of Tobruk and destroy the British fortress of Bir Hakeim. There, against the massive force of Rommel's Afrika Korps, a young English hussar named Wellington Rider fights beside the French Foreign Legion.
Rider's father, Anton—the professional hunter who strides so dynamically through A Cafe on the Nile—is now a desert commando engaged in obliterating Nazi air bases and petrol dumps. Not only has Anton's old friend Ernst von Decken, a German soldier of fortune, meanwhile become the enemy, but also Anton's estranged wife has entered into an affair with a Frenchman who supports Rommel's campaign. Alliances shift, loyalties deceive, espionage thrives, and danger lies as much in the dark corners of Cairo as it does in the desert night. And at a barge on the Nile, at the Cataract Cafe, under the watchful eye of its proprietor, the enigmatic Goan dwarf Olivio Alavedo, Egypt frames its destiny.
“Romantic and eventful . . . a satisfying dose of wartime action,
private revenge, and seething passion.”
—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
“A World War II page-turner that’s part Masterpiece Theater,
part Raiders of the Lost Ark, part Casablanca.”
—The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The dashing series that began with The White Rhino Hotel and continued with A Caf on the Nile is moving its larger-than-life cast of exiles in 20th-century North Africa further ahead in time with each book. Still at the center of this latest installment is the exotic Goan dwarf Olivio Alavedo, with his circle of English friends, his beautiful children and his long-nurtured dreams of vengeance on those who have slighted him. The dashing Anton Rider is, as always, on the outs with his lovely and plucky wife, Gwenn, last seen nursing tribesmen mown down by Mussolini's troops in Eritrea. Now it's 1939, and war is about to engulf Cairo and the whole of North Africa, pitting Rider's old buddy, the brutally macho Ernst von Decken, against those accursed Englanders. Gwenn and Anton's eldest son, Wellington, insists on joining the army; what else can a chap do? Once again Gwenn has chosen the wrong lover, a terminally corrupt French fence-sitter, but all that is soon swept aside as the magnetic General Rommel and his Afrika Korps roar in to seize the Suez Canal. Yes, there's a role for wily old desert hand Anton, too, in harassing the German supply lines. It's an all-out, gung-ho war adventure, with much of the period glamour of The English Patient, but not a spot of psychological subtlety. The battle scenes are grimly garish, the plentiful suffering is endured in appropriate stiff-upper-lip silence. Exotic adventure fiction doesn't come much better and there's obviously a fourth chapter waiting in the wings.
