Perhaps once in a decade you come across a book like this. With fluid prose that carries you along, this book joins every major genre under one cover. Suspense, spy, historical, romance, coming of age – a thread of each type of story blends together almost seamlessly to craft a story that will appeal to a wide and varied audience. I admire the author’s attempt to include so many different types of elements into the story and, for the most part, feel the author has done so successfully. While I found the story itself intriguing, the characterization seemed lacking. The characters are “every man” (or every woman, as the case may be) and while that is admirable in an attempt to show how the average person was put in extraordinary circumstances, the characters were just dull enough that I didn’t care what happened to them and that is a problem. Not caring about the characters precludes the suspenseful feeling of a novel, it prevents the edge of your seat ride that this novel could have been and it certainly makes the romantic under current of the novel to seem superfluous. The characterization issue is minor though and only minimally affected my enjoyment of the book. Despite the tiny flaws, I found the story engaging enough to continue reading and adored the abrupt ending that seemed so fitting to the plotline and time period in history.

ARC Galley Proof