The Blurb (from Goodreads):
When librarian Patton Harcourt comes under sniper fire in her rural North Carolina home, she is thrown together with professional assassin Nemo and into a web of international deceit.
On the run from two German killers, Patton and Nemo discover a seventy-five-year-old Enigma message which leads them to Bletchley Park in England and a code breaker named Ruthie Drinkwater, an old flame of Patton's. Unable to complete the job of code breaking at Bletchley, the trio leaves and are pursued by the Germans, who support a white-supremacist agenda. The Germans work for Ingrid Weiss, whose grandfather was a prot�g� of Henrich Himmler and who is following in his footsteps.
When Patton, Nemo, and Ruthie break the code, they discover a message claiming that Himmler mastered alchemy, and Patton and Nemo are incredulous but determined to stop Ingrid Weiss from obtaining limitless wealth to promote her agenda. In need of a book owned by Weiss, they travel to Munich. When they break into her home to steal the book, they find themselves in a deadly situation.
Using the Enigma message, the group travels to Prague and then the Italian Alps. What they find when they arrive puts them in the crosshairs of Weiss and the Nazis, and leads to a high-stakes confrontation that will require allies from their pasts to ensure their survival.
My Thoughts:
I read this fast-paced, clever and cinematic contemporary thriller on the long flight from Sydney to Perth, and it was a perfect reading choice. The pages just whizzed past by themselves. Set in modern times, it tells the story of a feisty librarian and a mysterious assassin who join forces in a race against time to solve a German secret code from the last days of the war. With flashbacks to the creepy wartime activities by Heinrich Himmler and his minions, and a cast of sinister and eccentric characters, this book is crying out for a Hollywood remake.
