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Double Cross Blind

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Overview

December 1, 1941It is seven days before the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Days that are numbered for Sondegger, a Nazi spy captured in London while on a mission to take down the Twenty Committee, a German network of spies the British have turned.For American Tom Wall, the days have run together as he awakens to find himself locked in a British military asylum. Wounded and shell-shocked, all he knows is that his brother, Earl, betrayed his unit in Crete, causing one of the bloodiest massacres of the war.

Editorial Reviews

On the morning of December 1, 1941, at the start of Ross's debut thriller, American Thomas Wall wakes up in a London hospital, where he's recovering from wounds he suffered as a member of a Canadian unit massacred in battle on Crete. Thomas blames his diplomat brother, Earl, for betraying his unit to the Nazis and wants to know where Earl is. Later that day, a British intelligence officer persuades Thomas to pose as his brother in order to pump a captured German spy. Aware of Thomas's identity, the spy sets him on the trail of hidden microfilm containing information regarding the upcoming Japanese attack in the Pacific. Thomas attempts to enlist the aid of Earl's wife, Harriet, but as she works for British intelligence, she has her own plans. A by-the-numbers plot, clich d minor characters (including cockney hit men and a gold-hearted stripper), protagonists as unlikable as the antagonists and a foreseeable conclusion (hint: America will go to war) all add up to a routine read. Agent, Henry Morrison. (July 12) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Joel N. Ross

Joel Ross studied history at Hampshire College and taught English abroad for a short time before writing Double Cross Blind, his first novel. His father served in WWII, along with all five of his uncles, and their stories provided some of the background for the book. Currently, Ross lives in Maine with his wife, Lee.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Doubleday

Filesize

927.10 KB

Number of Pages

384

eBook ISBN

9780307278517

Awards

  • Crime Writers' Association Awards

Excerpt from: Double Cross Blind by Joel N. Ross

11:46 p.m., December 1, 1941


The young woman hitched her skirt to her thighs, revealing slender legs encased in lisle stockings.

"I do apologize they're not silk," she told the man in the shiny black waistcoat. "So terrifically hard to find silk these days, isn't it " She lifted her skirt a fraction higher, and as the man gaped she brought the heavy iron piping down hard on his skull.

He fell to his knees and made a funny wheeze.

It was rather exciting. She hadn't been in London during the Blitz, but oh how she'd envied them the drama. The whine and clump of the incendiaries and ack-ack shells, the streams of tracers and the barrage balloons bumbling overhead. Now the Luftwaffe was raiding more heavily again, and she felt a glow of pleasure at being part of the grand sweep of things--a glitzy Berlin cabaret, with brilliant spotlights sweeping the darkened stage, but better for the real tears and blood and love.

And bomb sites were super places to trap and scrap onetime informants. The man in the shiny waistcoat was like a funny crab, trying to crawl away over the rubble. She checked that the message he'd given her was intact. She knew that some people in the SD--the Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS--considered her flighty. They'd laughed that her code name should be Schmetterling, Butterfly. But she wasn't flighty. She was dedicated and smart and she did what needed doing.

She lifted the iron piping to finish the man but was interrupted by the gleam of a blackout torch pricking among the wreckage and an air warden calling out, "Hallo Miss You're within the danger area."

"Oh this poor man!" she cried. "Please--he's hit, he's injured. Oh, do help!"

She knelt as if to care for the man and put her knee on his throat.