THE COUNTERFEIT CANDIDATE - Book review

Brian Klein’s debut novel The Counterfeit Candidate (2021) – was written during Lockdown, doubtless one of many resulting from that misguided response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

The book is based on the widespread premise that Hitler did not actually die in the ill-fated Berlin bunker in 1945. Stalin believed the Führer had escaped – as did many other conspiracy advocates.

The main action takes place in 2012, in Buenos Aires and San Francisco.

Chief inspector Nicolas Vargas of the BA Police Department is investigating an audacious bank heist, where hundreds of safe deposit boxes have been stolen. Puzzlingly, as he begins to track down the culprits, he comes up against a dead end – and dead crooks, all of whom were tortured before they were executed.

A tenuous link leads to San Francisco and the powerful Pharma group The Franklin Corporation. The head of this corporation is Richard Franklin, whose son John has just secured the Republican Presidential nomination which is highly likely to lead him to the White House.

Vargas enlists the help of San Francisco Lieutenant Troy Hembury, a 50-year-old muscle-bound African American, to investigate.

Their probe is soon fraught with lethal danger...

Spelling out anything else would spoil the story. This is fast-paced writing, with slick scene shifts and flashbacks, to be expected from an accomplished television director with over 25 years’ experience.

Pick it up and you won’t want to put it down until the end.

And then there’s the sequel, already out: The Führer’s Prophecy which again features Vargas and Hembury, some ten years after the events in the first book. 

PRISONER WITHOUT A NAME, CELL WITHOUT A NUMBER - Book review

Jacobo Timerman’s autobiographical book Prisoner without a name, Cell without a Number was published in 1980, its English translation released in 1981.

Timerman was the editor of La Opinión, Argentina’s leading liberal newspaper. The paper was not popular with the military government because he was not averse to castigate both the Left and the Right for human rights abuses. Inevitably, it came to a head one dawn in ‘April 1977 some twenty civilians besieged my apartment in midtown Buenos Aires. They said they were obeying orders from the Tenth Infantry Brigade of the First Army Corps’ (p9). He was covered with a blanket and bundled in a car and taken away. Eventually, blindfolded and handcuffed, he discovered he was kidnapped ‘by the extremist sector of the army’ (p29) ...which was at the heart of Nazi operations in Argentina...  In effect, they mistakenly believed he was part of a Jewish anti-Argentine conspiracy!

He was held for two and a half years – tortured, abused and humiliated – without charges ever being brought against him.

It was probably because he was internationally known and his wife continued to raise awareness of his plight that he was not murdered – or ‘disappeared’. Certainly, he believed that his only crime was to be born Jewish.

‘Entire families disappeared. The bodies were covered in cement and thrown to the bottom of the Plata or Paraná rivers. Sometimes the cement was badly applied and corpses were washed up along the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay... (others were) thrown into old cemeteries under existing graves... (and some) heaved into the middle of the ocean from helicopters... (while others were) dismembered and burned... Small children were turned over to grandparents or more commonly presented to childless couples in Chile, Paraguay, and Brazil ...’ (p50/51).

Then in late 1979, his citizenship of Argentina was revoked and he was expelled from the country, and then resided in Israel.

Timerman was born in Bar, Ukraine, to Jewish parents. To escape the Russian persecution of Jews and pogroms there, the family emigrated to Argentina in 1928, when he was five years old.

This is a searing account of a brave man. He died in November, 1999, aged 76.