But he doesn’t really care.\u00a0 Yet.\u00a0 He’s a shattered man.\u00a0 His wife and son were killed by a Resistance bomb, and though he’s ruthless in his work, he’s dead inside until something unexpected happens during what should be a routine roundup.<\/p>\n (the author of The Darkest Hour)<\/em><\/p>\n Schumacher does a splendid job of showing how Rossett is unexpectedly brought back to life.\u00a0 The author creates a London sunk in misery, despair, dankness, corruption, and fog while maintaining an almost breakneck speed through the course of the book. I really wanted to put everything else aside and just read, read, read.\u00a0 The intense action scenes can sometimes be too choreographed, but they’re exciting and believable; Rossett’s stubbornness, strength, and fury always make sense.<\/p>\n The Darkest Hour<\/em> is wildly compelling and filled with surprises as well as a fascinating stream of slimy characters at all levels of society. The few decent people are candles in the wind.<\/p>\n How good is this book?\u00a0 When I finished it, I picked up the sequel right away: The British Lion<\/em>.\u00a0 You probably will, too.<\/p>\n Lev Raphael is the author of The German Money<\/em><\/a> and 24 other books in many genres.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The 19th century American Quaker abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier is best remembered for his refrain that the saddest words are \u201cIt might have been.\u201d But\u00a0 writers of alternative history fiction would disagree.\u00a0 What could be more exciting than hijacking a major world event and upending what really happened? SS-GB, Fatherland, Dominion, The Man in … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[614],"tags":[611,122,613,610,501,615,616,411,618,612,617],"class_list":["post-1914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alternative-history","tag-alternative-history","tag-suspense","tag-the-british-lion","tag-the-darkest-hour","tag-thrillers","tag-tony-schumacher","tag-wartime-thrillers","tag-world-war-two","tag-world-war-two-thrillers","tag-ww-ii","tag-ww-ii-thrillers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1914"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1957,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1914\/revisions\/1957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"darkest\"](\"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/darkest.jpg\")
<\/a>He follows orders.\u00a0 He knows what he’s doing is wrong and doesn’t want to know where the Jews are really going.\u00a0 Like most other people in London and England, he wonders if the “stories” are rumors.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Churchill and the King are in Canada in case you wondered, and there’s a “new King” we never see.\u00a0 There’s also a resistance movement and the IRA is somewhere in the shadows, too.\u00a0 America has left the war after FDR’s death, but we don’t get much more detail about the rest of the world or even Britain. And Schumacher’s German characters often seem more English than German at times–but those are minor flaws.<\/p>\n