Nazi plot in alternate history thriller

THE Afrika Reich, The Devil's Edge, How the Dead See, Plugged.

THE Afrika Reich, The Devil's Edge, How the Dead See, Plugged.

The Afrika Reich
By Guy Saville
Hodder & Stoughton,433pp, $29.99

IT'S 1952, a decade since the Dunkirk fiasco, World War II is over, Britain and Germany signing a non-aggression pact, creating the Council of New Europe. In Africa, the swastika flies from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean, black Africans corralled into slave labour and gleaming white autobahns criss-cross the tundra. Ex-French Foreign Legionnaire turned mercenary Burton Cole, a man who grew up in Africa, is offered a contract to assassinate Walter Hochburg, governor-general of Nazi Africa. But Cole also has score to settle with Hochburg and because of them his mission becomes unstuck and he is forced to flee for his life, the stench of kerosene and fire rarely leaving his mouth, the flash of gunfire never absent for long. This graphic, pacy alternate history thriller is scarily convincing.

The Devil's Edge
By Stephen Booth
Sphere,352pp, $32.99

THE Devil's Edge is a 19km-long wall of rock in the Peak District in northern Britain created through glacial action 20,000 years ago, a formidable barrier protecting the clusters of expensive grey-roofed houses in the valleys and wooded dales beyond the ragged edges. But people are having their heads caved in during a series of brutal home invasions and the Edge is no longer preventing them. Nor is Detective Sergeant Ben Cooper and his Edendale colleagues; there are no leads and no suspects. There is a terrible sense of evil enveloping the moorland that affects everyone connected as the police hunt the suspects known as "the Savages". This is the 11th novel in Booth's award-winning series about Cooper, which is new to me, but this thriller has a singular, quite mythical sense of place.

How the Dead See
By David Owen
Forty Degrees South,234pp, $24.95

A WELCOME return by David Owen to this droll series, sixth in the Pufferfish police procedural novels set in Tasmania. Again it features Detective Inspector Franz Heineken, aka Pufferfish, a gloriously curmudgeonly cop, still with a few irons in the fire, though less of the latter in the belly. Like his namesake, he's a prickly, toxic bastard with the ability to inflate and even explode when provoked. He's really only at home in muddy waters, where he feeds on the detritus of his bedevilled island home. This time he investigates the possible suicide of a former international Aussie film star, Rory Stillrock. There's also the theft of a valuable diamond necklace from a stately Hobart home. Elegant prose, eccentric and oddly comical hero and sardonic insights into the delights of island living.

Plugged
By Eoin Colfer
Headline,277pp, $29.99

FROM the author of the bestselling Artemis Fowl children's titles comes this seriously menacing crime debut with lashings of Elmore Leonard-style smarts. Daniel McEvoy, an ex-military Irishman in New Jersey, ekes out an existence as a bouncer at Cloisters, a seedy strip joint where staff carry antiseptic wipes. When his girlfriend, club hostess Connie, is murdered on the premises he's suddenly embroiled in a series of incidents involving a cop-killing cop, a criminal overlord, the drug-dealing Mike Madden , a corrupt lawyer and an unhinged neighbour who is convinced that Dan is her ex-husband. Not to mention Madden's enforcer Macey Barrett, whom Dan kills with a key to the neck at the start of his adventures. A highly enjoyable caper to be devoured at speed.