Bodyguard of Deception by Samuel Marquis

Most of the German characters are obsessed with the German author Karl May's popular cowboy novels set in the American southwest, a trait that carries over to some of the Germans in Altar of Resistance. It's more of a straight-ahead thriller than the new novel: a German spy tries to share intelligence about the impending D-Day invasion with headquarters before it's too late. His previous WWII novel Bodyguard of Deception, set in at the Camp Pershing German POW camp in Colorado, has zero characters in common with Altar of Resistance but also explores a little-known facts about the war.

It's all very Falcon Crest: the dialogue gets soapy at times but the author is always advancing his plot. He's after an epic Doctor Zhivago tale and it would take an entire 10-episode miniseries to film all the entanglements introduced in the novel. Plus she's Colonel Giovanni's biological daughter and both men treat Teresa as their child.Įach character in the paragraph above is loosely based on actual historical figures (except Wolff: he's 1oo% the actual guy) but the family connections are entirely a product of Marquis' imagination. Their daughter is Teresa Di Domenico, who abandons her Royal heritage to join the Partisan underground. He emigrated to the USA to get away from the family curse.

Their son is Captain John Bridger, spy in the American-Canadian First Special Service Force. That ex-wife is Marchesa Bianca di Domencio and she's now married to Italian resistance Colonel Giovanni Di Domenico. He changed his name from Wilhelm Kruger and had extensive plastic surgery after his wife shot him in the face more than a decade before. SS Colonel Wilhelm Hollman is SS General Karl Wolff's diplomatic liaison in Rome. The family at the center of the novel is a tangled mess. For generations, the pontiff has been painted as a borderline Nazi sympathizer but the author draws on a lot of new scholarship that details the pope's endorsement of German attempts to assassinate Hitler (including Operation Valkyrie).

In Altar of Resistance, Marquis is working out his obsession with Pope Pius XII's role in the resistance. A good comparison might be Tom Clancy, whose first novel was published by the Naval Institute Press and they let him keep all the detailed description that a mainstream house would've seen as too complex. If he was working with an editor who was aiming to see his book at airports, they'd want him to trim away many of the most interesting details in hopes of making it more commercial. Another example of publishing your own work: Marquis is a student of history and he gets to dig as deep as he likes into odd corners of WWII history.

Bodyguard of Deception by Samuel Marquis