The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye, Lagercrantz - B

                                               This is the fifth book in the Lisbeth Salander series and the second by this author, the official successor to Stieg Larsson. It continues the story of Lisbeth, ties together pieces from previous novels  and, presumably, leaves open all sorts of future possibilities. The focus is on both Lisbeth and Blomquist uncovering a diabolical experiment involving twins. Decades earlier, a Swedish social/medical  entity separated twins at birth in an effort to study the consequences of varied child-rearing circumstances. Those who managed the experiments work diligently to hide their history and protect each other. Tie in plot lines involving unassimilated Muslim immigrants and a particularly vicious criminal and you wind up with an enjoyable, but clearly not great, addition to the series.

A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron - The Forgotten Heroes of World War II, Cloud and Olson - A*

                                              This is the history of those Poles who were able to escape after Germany's occupation and continue the fight.  Poland had developed a sophisticated aeronautical training program and the young country had a wealth of capable pilots. Outmanned and outgunned, they made a show of it during the brief conquest of their homeland. Tens of thousands escaped, many through Romania, and would fight for the Allies. Some fought in France, and then escaped to Britain. They were welcomed by Churchill, but were skeptically assessed by the RAF, which was painfully unaware of their skills. The Battle of Britain, perhaps the most famous aerial conflict ever, began on August 8, 1940. Very quickly, it was apparent the Poles could fly and fight, and thus were allowed to fly as members of the Polish Air Force, albeit under RAF command and in RAF uniforms with Polish insignia. There were two all-Polish squads: the Poznan and the Kosciuszko. The Kosciuszko Squadron's first action was on August 18 and all seven of the Hurricanes that sighted Germans had a confirmed kill. Shooting planes down at the rate of 40 per week, the Poles were soon heroes of the realm, recognized by the public and the chain-of-command all the way up to the King. They were more successful than their British counterparts because they were older, had more total flying hours, had fought in Poland and France, had learned to fly without radio or radar and thus were more instinctive and used to scanning the skies visually. On the climactic day of the Battle of Britain, September 15, fully 20% of the RAF pilots in the air were Poles. The Kosciuszko Squadron shot down 126 planes during the six-week battle, twice as many as any RAF squadron. The British high command, as well as later historians, agree that the Battle could not have been won without the Poles.
                                               The second half of the book veers away from the squadron and attempts to discuss Poland's plight in the war. Both signators to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact wreaked unspeakable horrors upon the Poles. Both countries simply killed anyone perceived to be a  threat to their dictatorship. Throughout the war, the Poles continued to fight and to fight very well. Indeed, they were the preferred escort for all of the bombers. However, after Yalta, they realized they had fought in vain.  The country was occupied by the Red Army, which wasn't leaving anytime soon. When the UN met for the first time in April 1945, "Poland - the first country to resist Hitler; the only country to fight the Nazis from the first day to the last; the one country defeated by Germany that neither surrendered nor collaborated - was not on the list of invitees." A year later, the British government told the thousands of Poles who had fought for Great Britain that they were being demobilized and should return to Poland. Most refused, and many were eventually resettled in the UK. They had to move on from the stress of combat in a foreign land.  Few survived until Poland was free. One who did was Witold Urbanowicz, who had suffered through a series of inconsequential jobs raising his children in Queens, NY. The 'ace' of the Polish Air Force returned to Warsaw, where he was mobbed as a national hero and made a general.
                                               This fabulous book was written with a deep admiration of the Poles, that I now fully subscribe to. I'm truly impressed. The  Poles were from a country that had existed for only two decades, after 120 years of Partition. They fought bravely and effectively, forgotten by their allies. In 1984, when the world celebrated the 40th anniversary of D-Day, Poland,  whose men were cited for their courage that day, was not invited. Sadly for them, their families and countrymen, the German occupation would be succeeded by a forty-five year Soviet one. Freedom for the Poles has been scarce.

A Legacy of Spies, LeCarre - B +

                                               I believe I first read "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold' in the Reader's Digest abridged version five-and-a-half decades ago. I was in high school and now I have the inestimable pleasure of reading about Bill Haydon, Toby Esterhause, Percy Alleline, Roy Bland, Oliver Laycon, George Smiley and Control while the latest iteration of the Circus grills an eighty-year-old Peter Guillam about what went wrong in Operation Windfall in the early sixties. LeCarre is back and better than ever at eighty-five.
                                              The premise is that heirs of Alec Leamas and Liz Gold, both dead on the Berlin Wall in 'Spy', have come after the British government for compensation for the deaths of their parents. They have unearthed some Stasi files and feel that Smiley and Guillam negligently allowed their parents to die decades earlier. Peter uses all of his skills to dodge, weave and generally avoid the inquiries of his inquisitors, lawyers named Bunny, Tabitha and Laura. The lawyers inform Peter that they have found a London safe-house founded by Smiley and somehow, still funded by Treasury, and in it, all the lost Windfall files. Going through the files is a step back in time to the Cold War and the tradecraft of an earlier era. LeCarre ties this history into some of his more famous Smiley books by having Leamas obsessed with the possibility of a mole at the top of the Circus, which of course was the underlying theme of the great Smiley trilogy he wrote in the 70's. Peter concludes the whole process is nonsense, slips off and finds Jim Prideaux, who tells him how to find Smiley. George is highly offended and defends their and the Circus's role in fighting the Cold War, although he ruefully acknowledges that the spies didn't really effect the outcome. I suspect his is LeCarre's epitaph on the events of that era. As always, his books are complex and brilliantly written.
                                           

The Exception, Judd - B-

                                               This novel has achieved enough critical acclaim and attention to be made into the proverbial 'major motion picture'. The setting is Wilhelm II's mansion in Holland in the spring of 1941 as he continues his over two-decade-long exile and hopes for an invitation to return to Berlin as the restored monarch. He receives as an overnight guest Heinrich Himmler, whom Wilhelm concludes is one of "the shirted gangsters". Although Wilhelm was virulently anti-semitic, he apparently was appalled by Kristallnacht.
                                               'Willy' was in many ways a tragic figure, in completely over his head as Kaiser, and clearly one of those who led Europe into a conflagration it is still recovering from. The fascinating insight here is his total lack of intellectual consistency. He alights on topics, exposes beliefs and moves on in different directions simultaneously. He was a lightweight and like his cousin 'Nicky', a glaring example of the failure of hereditary monarchical systems.

Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes, Sims - C +

                                           The young Scottish-born physician modeled his famed detective on a medical school professor, Joseph Bell, who tried to deduce facts and information about patients from their appearances, the condition of their hands, shoes and clothing. Doyle was well-educated and, as a boy, had totally immersed himself in books and literature of all kinds.  Indeed, at one point, the library in Edinburgh advised his mother that he would be limited to two books per day. He was a dreamer who loved the idea of travel and during medical school, shipped out on a whaler one summer. He graduated in 1881 and took a tour as a physician on a boat to Africa before opening a practice in Portsmouth. He practiced during the day and wrote at night. He was able to sell a short story here and there.  Eventually, he was becoming successful and even appeared in American publications.  He decided that he had to write a full-length book.  He did not invent the genre of the detective novel. Poe, with a character he used three times, Auguste Dupin, preceded him by forty years. In the late winter and early spring of 1886, he penned 'A Study In Scarlet' narrated by Dr. John Watson and featuring one of the most famous characters in literature. He based the name of his star creation on a London detective, Inspector Thomas Sherlock and the American physician and poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Sherlock Holmes was born. The book met with some critical success and he followed up with 'The Sign of Four'. He also wrote a few historical novels that were published on both sides of the Atlantic. He engaged an agent who obtained a contract for him to write six Holmes short stories. Fame and fortune soon followed and he put his medical practice behind him. He moved to London, publicly acknowledged his debt to Dr. Bell, and became one of the most successful writers in English history. This book has some interesting information, but I spent the time reading it wondering how you could make the story of Arthur and Sherlock so bloody boring.

The Divided City, McCallin - B

                                               Reinhardt is back in Berlin in 1947 and assigned to his old job as a detective at Kripo. He unearths a serial killer tracking down men from a particular Luftwaffe fighter squadron group.  Back and forth across the divided city, he works the issue and bumps up against all of the Allied powers and various Germans pursuing different agendas. Somehow, he overcomes the odds, finds his man but loses him to the tumult of post-war Berlin.
                                               Novels like this appeal to me because they shed light on topics of history I've not come across. Here, for instance, the author goes into great detail on the contretemps among the occupying forces on just about anything they can argue about. Similarly, there were veterans willing to move on and those hoping for some sort of restoration. Veterans of both world wars lost their pensions and their families lost any survivor benefits.  Returnees from the east were shunned because they all seemed so haunted by Soviet captivity. Perhaps the most intriguing bit of information is  that there was no glare or reflection in post-war Berlin. There was virtually no glass intact in any building.
                                               Even though I've enjoyed these three novels this summer, I really wouldn't recommend them. As I said above and in the two earlier comments, there's a ton of historical background information that I find fascinating.  But the books are too long and the plotting too convoluted.