Bells of Hell, The
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Counter-intelligence agent Jacob Welker recruits a number of civilians to help foil a suspected terrorist attack by German spies in New York in 1938.
March, 1938. Otto Lehman arrives in New York on the S.S. Osthafen to be immediately confronted by two men with FBI badges . . . only, that isn’t his real name and the men aren’t with the FBI. The next day Lehman is found tied to a chair, beaten to death and naked, in an abandoned Brooklyn warehouse.
The sole witness to the crime, Andrew Blake, a homeless man struggling through the Great Depression, claims those responsible were speaking German. With the threat of the perpetrators being Nazis, President Roosevelt’s own covert counter-intelligence agent Jacob Welker is brought in to investigate.
Welker recruits Blake along with Lord Geoffrey Saboy, a British ‘cultural attache’, and his wife Lady Patricia, to help him to thwart a Nazi terrorist attack. But who exactly are the Nazis, what is their target and when will they strike?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1938 New York City, this middling thriller from Edgar-finalist Kurland (The Infernal Device) opens promisingly enough. When Johann Steuber, posing as a German toy exporter, disembarks from his ship in Brooklyn, he's met by two men who identify themselves as FBI agents and accuse him of being a member of the German Communist Party. Just minutes after they lead him away, the real FBI agents show up. The fake FBI agents, who are Nazi operatives, take Steuber to an abandoned building. By chance, Andrew Blake, an unemployed typesetter squatting in the building, witnesses Steuber's torture and death. Though he was afraid to intervene, Blake does report the crime to the police and ends up being recruited by an Office of Special Intelligence agent to infiltrate a New York chapter of the Bund. After gaining the confidence of American Nazi sympathizers, Blake learns that Steuber's abductors have a sinister plan that won't surprise anyone who has read a lot of spy fiction set in this era. As Kurland's Professor Moriarty series with its creative plotting and characterization shows, this author can do better.
