A Thousand Suns »

Alex Scarrow is the author of Last Light. He is the brother of historical novelist Simon Scarrow.

It's early April of 1945 and the bloodied days of World War II. The Nazi regime is being slowly throttled by the oncoming Russian and Allied armies and Hitler rages uselessly in his Berlin bunker. But the high command have one more throw of the dice to make. An audacious plan is hatched to save the Fatherland and beat off the oncoming apocalypse. All it will take is a hodge-podge squadron of escort fighters, a captured U.S. bomber, and one brave but suicidal pilot to fly it over the Atlantic into the beating heart of America. Half a century later, a rusting plane is discovered, sunk with its crew, off the coast of New York—a relic from a bygone age. Chris Roland, a brilliant young photographer, is sent to take photos of this time capsule. But it is only when he discovers that the fragments of Nazi uniforms on the decaying corpses that he realizes that he has come across a secret so terrible that even 50 years later it could still kill him.

Publishers Weekly

Scarrow debuts with an intense what-if that ties a present-day freelance photographer to an ill-fated WWII German assault on Manhattan. Photojournalist Chris Roland heads to Rhode Island to investigate reports of an American B-17 bomber wrecked just off the coast. When he crawls into the submerged cockpit, he finds what appear to be the skeletal remains of a Luftwaffe pilot. His curiosity piqued, Roland investigates, but his interest and his photographs put him in the crosshairs of James Wallace, an aging spy charged by Truman to keep the B-17 and its mission top secret. The prose is unsteady in places, but Scarrow has a real talent for pacing, and he keeps the tension escalating as the action flips between Wallace's pursuit of Roland and the final days of WWII. (Apr.)

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