Author: nuwuser

The gung-ho Marines familiar to readers of Griffin’s seven Corps novels (Behind the Lines, etc.) return for an eighth adventure–and not their best. Young Marine officers and enlisted men with high morale and low morals such as Ed Banning, Ken McCoy and Ernie Zimmerman are perfect for a secret (but remarkably improbable) OSS operation behind enemy lines in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia in 1943. Their mission: to establish a clandestine weather station and rescue a wayward group of Americans who fled China after the Japanese invasion in 1941 and have been lost in Mongolia for nearly two years. While the plot teases with a promise of suspense in an exotic and forbidding locale, the reality is that not a shot is fired, not a cliffhanger is encountered and three-fourths of the narrative is set safely back in the States, where the characters spend most of their time drinking, womanizing, disobeying orders and wringing their hands over how they can rejoin the war. Under the leadership of fatherly Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, a kind of Marine den daddy, they do return, although the result is anticlimactic. Numerous side plots provide color and historical perspective.

( Courtesy of Publishers Weekly,   hardcover  549 pages )

For more than ten years, Dolores Masson has joined the women who march in Buenos Aires’ great square in memory of the Disappeared–the legions of family and loved ones who vanished without a trace at the hands of the military regime during Argentina’s Dirty War. And every week she visits the house where Carlos and Teresa Rueda sometimes offer mystical visions that locate the Disappeared. Dolores has nearly lost hope when Teresa one night utters the whereabouts of those Dolores has spent the last year in search of–the two infant grandsons who vanished without a trace when their mother was abducted.

This crystalline vision sets in motion an inexorable chain of events in which Dolores will regain custody of the boys, now teenagers, who have no memory of her or their parents; in which the general who masterminded their abduction will find his world imploding; and in which the only parents the boys have ever known will be torn apart by hatred, anger, and remorse. With the same breathtaking lyricism and emotional insight that made Imagining Argentina and Naming the Spirits unforgettable reading experiences for legions of readers, Tales from the Blue Archives shows one of our most gifted novelists at the height of his powers.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,  272 pages )

The Jukebox Queen of Malta is an exquisite and enchanting novel of love and war set on an island perilously balanced between what is real and what is not.
It’s 1942 and Rocco Raven, an intrepid auto mechanic turned corporal from Brooklyn, has arrived in Malta, a Mediterranean island of Neolithic caves, Copper Age temples, and fortresses. The island is under siege, full of smoke and rubble, caught in the magnesium glare of German and Italian bombs.
But nothing is as it seems on Malta. Rocco’s living quarters are a brothel; his commanding officer has a genius for turning the war’s misfortunes into personal profit; and the Maltese people, astonishingly, testify to the resiliency of the human spirit. When Rocco meets the beautiful and ethereal Melita, who delivers the jukeboxes her cousin builds out of shattered debris, they are drawn to each other by an immediate passion. And, it is their full-blown affair that at once liberates and imprisons Rocco on the island.
In this mesmerizing novel, music and bombs, war and romance, the jukebox and the gun exist in arresting counterpoint in a story that is a profound and deeply moving exploration of the redemptive powers of love.

( from the sleeve,   368 pages )