Death Watch Beetle, A Historical Post WWII Spy Thriller

Death Watch Beetle, A Historical Post WWII Spy Thriller

England and the rest of Europe are trying to recover from WWII and also cope with a belligerent Soviet Union intent on dominating the Cold War. An executive of a British engineering company, Donald Harvey, is co-opted in the early 1950’s by a joint project of the CIA and British Secret Service MI6, to assist in tracing the whereabouts of a missing WWII high level Nazi, SS general Hans Kammler. This war criminal had been responsible for the design of death camps, and the sealing of the Warsaw Ghetto. As one of Germany’s most senior SS officers, Hitler had personally placed Kammler in charge of all production of secret weapons programs including the V1, V2, and jet aircraft production as well as the development of ultra-secret super weapons.

In tracing this wartime criminal through three continents, Harvey is constantly torn between his sworn endeavor and his conscience. He knew the Nazi had never been tried at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in absentia, and he wondered why? Was it because he had escaped with technology for which the West and the Soviets would be willing to ignore his war crimes, in return for his allegiance? This is the conundrum facing Harvey as he follows the dangerous trail of his quarry through one international sequence after another. 

Donald Harvey’s conscience is also tested with the fact of his own love interest with Alijca Kozlowksi who was a survivor of wartime atrocities against the Polish, and Jewish populations by both Russia and Germany. It is further tested and his resolve to hunt down the Nazi is intensified when Alijca’s Polish uncle is brutally murdered by a Russian assassin in a peaceful and bucolic English town.

This author brings the story to a startling and climactic conclusion by providing a plausible explanation as to the fate and final whereabouts of the war criminal. Interestingly, in these final chapters, it also provides a certain nexus to the early development of the apartheid system in South Africa. This aspect in itself, will be a revelation to students of history.