Black Phoenix - Hardcover

Bernau, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446516104 ISBN 13: 9780446516105

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 1994

Synopsis

As Hitler escapes Berlin during the final days of World War II, a killer virus more dangerous than the nuclear bomb is being tested in a secret German camp

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Bernau (Candle in the Wind, 1990; Promises to Keep, 1988) fails to make an unoriginal story worth telling as he surmises what would have happened if Adolf Hitler, instead of killing himself in 1945 in Berlin, had escaped across the globe with a plan to destroy the world. As WW II nears its end, Major Thomas Sheridan, a member of the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps, has come to Berlin to investigate a threatening microbe called Phoenix. He is accompanied by Debra Marks, a sexy British naval officer. Their adventures begin at a destroyed Nazi facility where scientists developed the microbe and tested it on concentration camp prisoners; there the duo find the body (or so they think) of Joseph Goebbels, dead by suicide. Meanwhile, for reasons that remain obscure, the Nazis kidnap Angelique von Stahl, a renowned and skillful German pilot, and take her to a secluded mountain retreat where she meets Goebbels himself, who had faked his suicide. Sheridan and Marks follow the Nazis from Berlin to Buenos Aires, where a series of plot twists makes for a predictable ending in which our heroes discover that Hitler, who has also not committed suicide, is the mastermind of Phoenix. The characters, both fictional and historical, are one-dimensional; the writing is full of hackneyed phrases (``Stevenson's entire body filled with fear''; ``sheets of flames...roared into the night sky''). The work flirts briefly with the reader's imagination but generally falls flat. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Bernau ( Candle in the Wind ) is the latest in a long line of thriller writers to suggest that because Hitler's corpse was never positively identified, he and his evil cohorts managed to escape from the bunker. This time we witness a final, desperate attempt to wreak destruction by poisoning the East Coast of the U.S. with the Phoenix virus, an organism that destroys everything in its path, to be launched from South America. A highly trained American Intelligence agent, Major Thomas Sheridan, joins forces with his lover, British agent Debra Marks, to thwart the fiendish Nazi plotters who have developed the virus. A promising beginning, echoing the known events at Hitler's personal retreat during his last days, loses its impetus in a clutter of lovemaking, undeveloped subplots and careless writing. ("If there was such a thing as a special chemical attraction reserved only for one person, they had it with each other, or perhaps she made love to everyone like that.") The author substitutes movement for plot as weakly drawn characters rush from place to place until the final melodramatic climax. This is an undistinguished item, more suitable as an outline for a miniseries than as a book.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Pub
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0446516104
• ISBN 13: 9780446516105
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 291