Thunder Point

After 20 years of writing both WW II and contemporary thrillers, Higgins combines the two in a breakneck yarn about the wreck of a Nazi submarine - and its bombshell secret. There's always much disbelief to suspend with a Higgins novel, and never more than here, where the author, per his usual recycling, revives two characters from Eye of the Storm (1992) in an incredible way. The story begins in 1945 as Hitler gives Martin Bormann a briefcase containing a document signed by the Duke of Windsor, agreeing to his ascent to the throne after a Nazi invasion of Britain. Cut to 1992 and the Caribbean island of St. John, where a diver chances upon a sunken Nazi sub and' pulls from it the captain's log. The diver flies to London; there, a translation of the log indicates that the sub carried Bormann to America, where he escaped just before the sub sank - with his briefcase still aboard. Word of the find reaches British intelligence honcho Charles Ferguson, who, conferring with the PM, determines that the Windsor document must be retrieved - but the diver is accidentally killed before he reveals the sub's location. So who does Ferguson tap to find the sunken vessel? Not an SAS agent or even James Bond, but IRA assassin Scan Dillon, who tangled with Ferguson in Eye of the Storm when the Irishman tried to blow up British PM John Major. The absurdity of Dillon working for Ferguson aside, the action whips along as the two fly to St. John, where - aided by a young lovely (who's a typically chaste Higgins heroine: there's no sex here) - they scramble to find the sub. Meanwhile, a venal British blueblood and his drug-smuggling Cuban ally, both with family ties to Nazism, are determined to reach the sub first.... Manly action with cliffhangers galore that's too derivative and contrived to be Higgins's best - but that's close enough to hit the charts with a wallop. (Kirkus Reviews)