Peter Leonard - Voices of the Dead

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Decently written but a bit silly

Although this book had its merits, I'm afraid I didn't think much of it in the end. It is decently written with a flat, punchy prose style which suited the story, and the Holocaust background did lend it some extra weight but overall I thought it was pretty thin stuff.

It is hard to give a flavour of the plot without giving more spoilers than I would like, but the whole story hinges on a ludicrously improbable coincidence and gets more unlikely by the page. It's a revenge story set in Detroit and Munich in 1971 with a wronged American, a survivor of Dachau concentration camp, in pursuit of a not-so-ex-Nazi who is now a prominent citizen and potential future Chancellor, but who is currently touring Germany and the USA personally killing dozens of Jews and people who might expose his past. I was never really gripped by it and eventually realised that it resembled one of the less subtle action movies. The characters are all pretty stereotypical and all the ancient clichés of the genre are there: the realisation that It's Personal, the flimsy reasons for not going to the police, the unrealistic action sequences which you can see coming a long way off, the unlikely buddies thrown together and so on - even the Implausibly Available Beautiful Woman. It really did get a bit much and even the Tense Climax wasn't particularly tense.

In fairness, I thought that the Holocaust stuff was genuinely important to Peter Leonard and he wasn't just using it to lend a spurious gravitas to the book, but even that was made ludicrous in places. A Nazi who led a squad which shot 600 Jews whom he regards as subhuman animals remembers one individual among the victims thirty years later. Oh, really? The sheer weight of implausibility became almost too much to bear in the end.

I did finish the book, largely because it's not too long and I thought, "Now I've got this far..." but if I'd left it on a train I wouldn't have worried too much and I certainly won't be waiting for the sequel. Only the most lukewarm of recommendations, I'm afraid.