… a lively thriller,
spiced up with romance. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
Mandy Robotham has written a number of historical thrillers
set in the years of the second World War, and now, with A Dangerous Game, she moves into the 1950s, when both Germany and
Britain were struggling to recover from the deprivations and damage of the war
years and to deal with new threats.
Her two central characters, London policewoman “Dexie” Dexter and German cop Harri Schroder, both have tragic backstories from the war which will slowly be revealed to the reader.
They meet when Harri is seconded to the Metropolitan Police
in London from his usual policing in Hamburg for a special operation and is
paired with Dexie. Harri has been sent for because the Met are trying to
establish the real identity of a successful British businessman who is
suspected of being a Nazi war criminal who has reinvented himself – and Harri
knew him in the bad old days.
But if the businessman really is Helmut Praxer, he has had plastic surgery to disguise himself, and anyway is lying very low. Briefed by a senior policeman and a mysterious Mr Johnson who seems to be from MI6, Harri and Dexie set off to find him, on an urgent deadline. If he is not identified and stopped, he is set to sign an important deal which will go against British interests. But someone seems to be briefing against Harri and Dexie.
And there is another enemy: the famous London smog of December 1952 which shut the city down for almost a week and claimed an estimated twelve thousand lives. Dexie and Harri are just as trapped as everyone else, and time is running out. And, inevitably, the two are increasingly drawn to each other – both damaged people and with a common purpose.
The descriptions of the smog are compelling and atmospheric, but some of the plotting does seem a little perfunctory and one or two of the events stretch credibility rather a long way. Praxer is an almost cartoonish baddie, and there could be a more convincing description of how he turned himself into an apparently above-board Brit. Sure, plenty of high-up Nazis escaped via various ratlines and often the former allies turned a blind eye, newly preoccupied with the Cold War.
More about this would have fleshed out the novel. But it is still a lively thriller, spiced up with romance. - Margaret von Klemperer
A Dangerous Game is published by Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 978-0-00-874425-0
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