Life must be filled up

The weather is worse than ever here today and if, like me, you’d enjoy a couple of hours’ distraction with a page-turning thriller, The Bleiberg Project is for you. It’s another from the imprint Le French Book and was a bestseller in France as Le Projet Bleiberg. It was translated by Simon John and published in English last year.

Jeremy Corbin/Novacek is a handsome, rich young Wall Street trader with a lot of baggage in his life and, as he sees it, not a lot to live for. Everything changes when two military types arrive on his doorstep to tell him that the father he hasn’t seen for years is dead. From then on Jeremy finds that everything he thought he knew about his family and his boss was wrong and that there is a link somewhere to horrific experiments carried out by Nazis during the war. ‘I have to get to the bottom of this. Take a shaker. Add a shot of Air Force, a slug of CIA, two fingers of Switzerland and a twist of Nazi. That’s a cocktail I can’t resist.’

This is the typical thriller scenario: bloke taken over by events he didn’t know he was connected to and suddenly in constant danger. ‘I’m caught up in something straight out of an Ian Fleming novel.’ The narrative whizzes along in short chapters, alternating with scenes from the past. I did guess one of the book’s secrets but that didn’t detract from the excitement of ‘how will they get out of this one?’ Highly recommended light, gripping reading, in spite of the high body count.

I read the book courtesy of NetGalley.