Ahira's Hangar

for a preview of the novel

The year is 1949. In this world, the USA was very isolationist, and so the British push Churchill aside and come to a separate peace with Hitler.

There is a house party at the country estate of a Viscount. The estate is called Farthing, and all of the important leaders of the group that brokered the peace with Hitler attend. The group is known as the Farthing set, after the name of the estate.

Also attending the party are Mr. and Mrs. David Khan. She is the youngest daughter of the family, he is her very wealthy and kind husband whom she loves dearly, and who loves her just as dearly in return. He is a philanthropist and a banker - and he is Jewish. The marriage was reluctantly agreed to by her father, and condemned by her very socially concious mother, who was a duke's daughter long before she became a viscountess.

One of the men attending the party - the man, in fact, who was most instrumental in brokering the peace, is murdered. He was the husband of one of the older daughters of the family. And the murder is a rather obvious frame up to make a Jewish person look guilty.

Throw in what appears to be an assassination attempt upon the Viscount and his daughter Lucy by a Boshevisk gumman, and things are a mess - and all right before a key vote to make a new national government.

Told in alternating points of view - first person from Lucy Khan, and third person from the Scotland Yard inspector assigned to the case - this book is an interesting alternate history, an interesting murder mystery - and a blood chilling look at how facism and anti-Semitism can creep over a nation.

I highly recommend Richard Harris' Fatherland. alternate post-WWII history which is also a murder mystery. Awesome read.

--A

Set in 1960, it is a world where Germany, England and the US (under president Joseph Kennedy) made peace, and the Third Reich stretches to the Ural mountains. Germany and Russia remain in a state of war, and Berlin is the realisation of Albert Speer's original vision for the capital.

Hitler is about to celebrate his 60th birthday, when KP (Kriminalpolizei) lieutenant (SS-Oberscharfuehrer) Xavier March, discovers the body of a prominent politician. His investigation eventually leads to evidence of the completey unknown endlösung, the final solution, as more and more officials who were involved in carrying it out are murdered to keep the genocide secret.

Damn good book.

--A

Fatherland by Thomas Harris. Fairly, well known book in the 1980s, was made into a movie staring Rutger Hauer as the criminal investigator on the case of the politician's murder. A key piece of the politician's murder turns out to the the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, in this alternate timeline the Wannsee conf. is a highly classified secret wartime conference of German wartime leaders.

Damn, I always make that mistake. Keep confusing the two Harris'. Anyway, yeah...the movie wasn't very good I thought.

--A