starts off great, falls into formula. Over all an enjoyable time spinner

books:


	• Second Objective, The Mark Frost Hyperion, 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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starts off great, falls into formula. Over all an enjoyable time spinner

The first half of this book was five star WWII material all the way. Frost has a knack for writing easy-breezy prose and in building up sympathetic characters. The story starts off just prior to the outbreak of the battle of the bulge where Hitler makes a winter-time counter offensive. We follow Bernie, a kid from Brooklyn who's parents moved back to Germany during the Great Depression. Now Bernie is in the German army and because he can speak English fluently, he is drafted into a top-secret mission.

The story follows Bernie's training and how he becomes partnered with Erich Von Reinsdorf, the son of a former diplomat and a psycho killer. The odd thing is that Erich starts off as a decent character, gets squished into a very two-dimensional parody of a serial killer and then is weakly fleshed out again towards the end, but by then it is too late to make us care about him again. Frost adds a third character, an American MP chasing the two across Europe.

I just want to put out there that the crescendo of this book for myself, and where I found a definitive high water mark, was just about half way through. Bernie sneaks back to an early rendezvous point and an altercation occurs in the basement there. If Frost had had the balls to either end it here or continue on with a series of disjointed observations, his writing could have stood up as classic. Instead from this point onwards, it is pretty much Frost wrapping up all the loose ends.

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Good Read but Could Have Been Better

This book has an excellent plot summarized above by other reviewers so I won't go into detail here. There is one character who is too much of a stereotype of a new York City detective and his lines can be irritating because of this. Also, the main bad guy's systematic killing of virtually everyone he runs into is almost comical. If someone once said "I never met a man I didn't like", this guy could have said "I never met a person I didn't kill" Also, although I know there is a lot of action going on, it's hard to follow how Mr. Bad Guy comes up with every tool he needs at the exact moment: wire cutters, syringes, attache cases. For a guy who's on the run and traveling lightly, he seems to have an amzing ability to accomplish this. Perhaps Mary Poppins was a Nazi sympathizer.

It still an interesting read, and it does motivate me to investigate further the Battle of the Bulge and other historical events included in the novel. However, I suspect there are more solid WWII suspense tales out there.

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The Second Objective

The book is an enthralling read. It captures the reader and transports her/him into the world of covert operations and war. Fast and entertaining with some hooks into German WWII mythology.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

Bestselling author Mark Frost makes a triumphant return to fiction with this riveting World War II thriller, based on a shocking real-life German operation run by "the most dangerous man in Europe"Fall 1944. Germany is losing, and the Americans are starting to hope they'll be home for Christmas. Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny, "Hitler's Commando," famed for his daring rescue of the imprisoned Mussolini, has just received orders for Operation Greif: He is to assemble a new brigade of 2,000 men, all of whom speak English, and send them behind Allied lines disguised as GIs, where they will wreak havoc in advance of a savage new offensive. And from those men, Skorzeny is to select a smaller group, made up of the twenty most highly skilled commandos fluent in American culture, to attempt an even more sinister mission -- the second objective -- which, if completed, not only would change the course of the war, but would change the course of history.Filled with real characters and details only recently released by the United States military, The Second Objective is historical fiction at its most pulse-pounding, its most unpredictable, and its most compulsively readable.

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