Cotton Malone sure stays busy for a retired guy. He used to be intelligence for the US Justice Department, but now he sort of freelances and does favors for the many folks he knows in power, and he also owns a bookshop in Denmark. The story begins when Cotton and his girlfriend, Cassiopeia Vitt, find themselves in a plane that is being shot down somewhere over Belarus or Poland. They were sent there by former US President Danny Daniels to investigate a woman who claimed to have information that could be helpful to the Chancellor of Germany for the last 16 years, Marie Eisenhuth, who is a friend of Danny Daniels. She is also up for reelection in a fierce battle for the Chancellorship against a man named Theodor Pohl, who is running on an extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant platform of Germany for Germans.
Each clue seems to lead Malone and Vitt to a new place, be it Belarus, Germany, Chile, South Africa and even Switzerland, all in the hopes of verifying what Marie Eisenhuth has been led to believe - that her opponent, Theodor Pohl, is the secret son of Adolf Hitler's primary money man, Martin Bormann. With every step they take, they uncover more and more, but it seems they have been unwittingly caught in a web of deceit, one planned to lure them in from the beginning with the intention of destroying Eisenhuth from the inside out. Sometimes the truth is better left buried...
The Kaiser's Web is an exciting book and I really enjoyed the characters and the historical aspects of it. Each chapter keeps you coming back as it skips around between what is happening with Malone and Vitt, Eisenhuth, and Pohl and his lackeys, so a chapter will end on a cliffhanger, only to start a new chapter in another location, keeping you reading until the next cliffhanger. Berry can certainly weave a tale. I've been intentionally vague with the storyline so the readers can discover it for themselves, but if you enjoy adventurous tales with a bit of Nazi hunting and lore, and suppositions on what might have happened had Eva Braun and Martin Bormann survived the end of the war, you'll enjoy The Kaiser's Web. I'll definitely keep my eye out for future Cotton Malone stories.
