By Tim Fleming

Eloquent Books, 2008

240 pp., $29.95, Hardcover

ISBN: 978-1-606-93401-2

Historical Fiction

Timothy Fleming claims to have spent a lifetime researching the CIA’s impact on post-World War II America. His blog, Left of the Looking Glass seems to back up that statement. But it’s his book, MURDER OF AN AMERICAN NAZI, that makes me believe it’s true. Reading like a documentary or a piece of non-fiction, Fleming’s historical novel reveals an America that we’ve all seen hints of but never want to believe could exist. Here is a story full of real world people, events and CIA operations anyone can discover on the net—if they have the right names, places and code names, all of which Fleming gives us. It’s a story about an American shadow government made up of greedy conglomerates, CIA enforcers and Nazi recruits.

Woven throughout the eerie tale is the life of one Marie Hannah Kanermann. Born in Dachau (a German concentration camp) as it is liberated by the Allies and raised in the U.S. by the friend of her dead mother, Marie grows up fighting the secret government with words and actions. Both her story and that of America after World War II unfold through the words of a retired cop, Don Hayes, as he tells one of his friends about the murder that never was: the death of ex-Nazi and CIA operative Walter Dornberger.

Impeccably written, Timothy Fleming’s novel feels just too real to be fiction. Perhaps it’s the sparseness of dialogue. Maybe it’s the fact most of the people mentioned in the book really existed. Could be that I’ve seen one too many American wars started for falsely stated reasons.

All I can tell you is that if you can wade through the complex strings of accusations laid out in the first half of the book, you won’t be able to put it down through the second half.

MURDER OF AN AMERICAN NAZI is a book meant to make you think. My opinion is it will also keep you from sleeping.

Hell of a job, Mr. Fleming.

Copyright © 2009 by Clayton Bye