A Thriller With A Historical Bent

Robert Parker meets Herman Wouk’s Winds of War.

80-year old Preston Swedge is found decomposing at his kitchen table. For Joe Henderson, neighbor and ex-cop, it is good bye and good riddance. The two had a running history and none of it was good. If Joe received a ten dollar bill each time a bourbon fueled Swedge called in a complaint about a never caught intruder named Rothstein, he could have paid for a year of his kid’s college. Captain Swedge was back in Italy in 1944. For Joe, the old man was losing his mind, ranting about “saving the world” and other wartime drivel.

At the estate sale to dispose of Swedge’s worldly possessions, Joe saves the deceased’s personal papers from the trash. A withered photo of a pilot rocks Joe when he reads the inscription “Paul Rothstein.” Joe’s trawling the internet finds Rothstein was killed in action August 1944. Maybe Swedge wasn’t losing his mind after all. Joe was sure of one thing: Swedge didn’t suck down Wild Turkey because he missed a Jewish kid from Brooklyn.

Days later, diaries written between 1938-1944 by Swedge and Rothstein are found hidden under the floor in Swedge’s study. Their lives were mirror images. Both diarists are the same age, but opposite in financial circumstances, relationships, and their views on world events. Their differences place them on an inevitable collision course-- Rothstein, a member of a secret Jewish defense group on a rogue mission to bomb the gas chambers at Auschwitz, a plan conceived by his older brother Jake and Swedge under orders from the Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy to stop the marauder and assure the deaths of the remaining 300,000 Jews deported from Hungary.

History shows Rothstein never completed his mission, and archived Air Force records list no enemy aircraft in the area the day of his death. How did Swedge arrange to have him shot down? When Joe’s contact in the FBI says Jake is still alive, he embarks on a crusade to find the man who has the last piece of the puzzle.