A trio of strong thrillers
For a few heady peacetime years, the Normandie was the most magnificent ship afloat. The dining room, it was boasted, was longer and more lustrous than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. But when the French liner burned and capsized at its Manhattan dock in 1942, it was not so much its beauty that was mourned as the loss of one of the fastest passenger ships ever built, then being refitted as an Allied troop transport that could outrun any U-boat. In Normandie Triangle (Arbor House; 475 pages; $13.95), Novelist Justin Scott evokes the grace and power of the great ship even as he describes its destruction and welds an ambitious Nazi stratagem to the smoldering hulk.
The U.S. Navy insists that the Normandie's sinking was accidental. Like many real-life experts, however, the novel's hero, Steven Gates, a naval architect who was aboard the ship when it burned, is convinced that Nazi saboteurs were responsible. In hope of proving his theory, Gates quits his top-level designing job and joins a salvage crew on the ship.
On another side of the triangle is the man who engineered the liner's demise, a Nazi spy posing as a Dutch salvage expert. Code-named the Otter, he is the illegitimate son of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, and thus has unlimited backing in a behind-the-lines war of disruption and sabotage aimed at closing the Port of New York.
The Triangle's overt heroes belong to a tough little unit called Group M, which spearheaded British intelligence in New York. They are engaged in a desperate effort to pin down Otter and keep the Atlantic sea lanes open. As an ironic result of Gates' own efforts to track down the master saboteur, the British group is convinced that he is the Otter. Gates meanwhile has found out that the German has smuggled over a minisub and plans to torpedo the Queen Mary with 15,000 troops aboard.
Justin Scott made his reputation in 1978 with The Shipkiller, a superbly written thriller that also had the sea and revenge as its themes. In Normandie, he is again a virtuoso of technical detail and characterization.
A compulsion of another sort drives Schism (Crown; 310 pages; $12.95), by Bill Granger. Father Leo Tunney, a Roman Catholic missionary and sometime CIA operative, totters back to civilization from the Cambodian jungle, where he has been missing for 20 years. Why? Before shipping him back to his order in Florida, the Company does its unsubtle best to pry the answer from the emaciated priest. Back home, Tunney attracts a lot of professional interest. There is a top KGB operative from Moscow, a sacerdotal snooper from the Vatican, a cold-blooded loner from a
Washington intelligence unit and enough assorted goons to fill a San Quentin production of A Chorus Line.
What they are all after is a journal in which the priest describes a Cambodia-based Soviet military project that could trigger World War III. The priest's journal is finally retrieved by a comely, red-haired reporter, Rita Macklin, who, unlike most other fictional red-haired reporters, is both credible and vulnerable. Schism, like his first novel, November Man, shows Bill Granger to be deft at high-wire suspense. His prose has the gritty tone of a Le Carre and a special feeling for a burned-out case.