33. A Sour Apple Tree by John Blackburn

My opinion of this book was thrown by misleading expectations.  This amazing cover suggested dry political espionage or perhaps an office murder.  The language and setting was very much in the British mold, with the protagonist being a high-ranking security officer and his top agent and they do dryly discuss past affairs of state.  Then things got a bit too colourful for my taste with a bizarre murder attempt and the agent going full Bond on the first woman he meets.  As I read through, I realized that this is more of a horror, semi sci-fi potboiler that should have had a much more garish cover.  The cover, to be fair, does symbolically represent what goes on in the book.  It begins with the resurgence of an old adversary, a British traitor named John Glyne who went over the Nazis in WWII and did english-speaking radio propaganda against the British.  His method was much nastier and less open to ridicule than the infamous Lord Haw-Haw and there were rumours that he later went into POW camps and somehow brainwashed British prisoners and turned them into traitors as well.

From the beginning, Glyne is described as having this tremendous charisma, so powerful that people feel compelled to follow him after being around him for a few minutes.  The way it is described in the book, it sounds not unlike Steve Jobs famous reality distortion field.  However, as the book progresses, the reader starts to suspect that we are moving into the supernatural territory.  More and more murders are being committed by subjects in insane asylums, ones that had shown no previous signs of wanting to do violence.  What starts as a hunt for an ex-Nazi traitor turns into a potential national murder crisis as the killing starts to infect the sane.  Much of the action is still an investigation and there are some really good regional inquiries and a discovery of a downed german sub.  A very fun, super-pompous old school Navy minister called Admiral Vane adds some fun to it all as well.  By the end, we are in full on Saturday morning matinee telepath battle and I had let go of my previous disappointment.  There were some minor annoying flaws, like one of the characters not phoning in what they were doing in order to make for a more suspenseful ending, but overall it ended up being quite enjoyable.

 

Nazi eyes make you dead!