100 books like Ghost Train

I picked this book because it is the 1st Jack Reacher novel, but they are all great. They speak to me because they depict a very unusual guy. A tough guy with a brain and a strong sense of right and wrong. A vagrant who fixes problems wherever he goes.

I have been accused of having a white-knight syndrome all my life, so I find this character riveting. Action, plot twists usually a touch of romance. These are all things that speak to me and Jack Reacher novels are full of them.

Great follow-up novel in Sanford’s Prey Series concerning a serial female killer. Sanford leaves the reader from a previous prey novel, where the female serial killer escapes.  This leaves his readers with a desire to learn more….a continuing storyline…and he more than satisfies that with her return in Mortal Prey.

Michael Connelly continues to hit it out of the park when it comes to police procedurals. The Dark Hours is the fourth of his five novels about a young LAPD detective, Renee Ballard, who works “the late show” (the nighttime hours) and catches a midnight murder. She seeks assistance from a friend—the semi-retired detective, Harry Bosch—in working the case. I’ve read every one of Connelly’s Bosch Series books and have loved them all. Once you become involved and engrossed—usually by the third page—you cannot stop reading! Connelly’s novels are that good. 

I always enjoy a warped plot with lots of twists and this one certainly didn’t disappoint. It was riveting and kept me on the edge of my seat until the very end. The fast pace of the story continually left me thirsty for what was to come next. I absolutely love the four strong female characters in this book. They are so unique and individual yet complement each other perfectly, making them a very believable and dynamic force of leading ladies. As the book progressed, I could see and feel the growth and development of each of the characters which made them not only believable, but relatable. This fast-paced page-turner had my heart pounding more than once and diving into the rest of the series without hesitation.

The story holds almost more sorrow than seems possible. Krystia Fediuk, her mother Kataryna, sister Maria and their longtime friends, many of them Jewish, live in a Ukrainian town that celebrated as their Soviet occupiers left in 1941. But the even more cruel Nazis arrived, joined by many more Germans and Balkans friendly to them. And they were determined to single out Jewish townspeople, eventually forcing them into a ghetto.

It was then that Krystia and her mother decided to hide three Jewish friends in a hole dug under their stove. The price for what the Nazis saw as their treachery was steep. Krystia fled to the Ukrainian insurgents in the forest, taking only her dwindling hope. Though fiction, the author based the book on several real Ukrainians and the stories of others who survived. 

If you want to know about art thefts in Europe during World War II, this is the book to read. This is the Bible!

Lynn Nicolas provides an exhaustive account of why the works were taken, where the looting took place, how it was done, how many artworks were plundered (the answer is in the hundreds of thousands), and what attempts were made after the war to recover the works and restore them to their owners.

I was awed by the extent of her research, which is truly groundbreaking. Before The Rape of Europa was published in 1994, little was known about the means and scale – and even the fact – of Nazi looting.  

Born in 1934 in Berchtesgaden, in the shadow of Hitler’s Eagles Nest, Irmgard Hunt witnessed the growth of fascist ideology among the people she loved during an otherwise idyllic childhood. As the shadow of World War II fell over the mountain, however, Hunt began to question and then disavow the Nazi doctrines she had accepted as a young child. As time went on and the regime crumbled literally before her eyes, she was vocal in confronting her country’s criminal past and in championing the democratic principles her elders had so easily dismissed.

I chose this memoir because it tells the compelling story of Germans and Austrians who joined the British forces to strike back against Nazi Germany—a story that is missing from most histories. First, they had to undergo many metamorphoses—a main theme of this memoir. Peter Masters—originally a member of a respectable Jewish family in Vienna—escapes to Britain and is a refugee from Nazi oppression, but in 1940 the British government identify him as an enemy alien and intern him. For his fourth metamorphosis he becomes a soldier in the British army, but the British government bans Austrians and Germans from bearing arms. After this ban is lifted there is a final metamorphosis when he joins a British commando unit. He writes, "The antithesis of 'lambs to the slaughter,' we fought and many of us died... Those who died preferred their fate to being gassed and cremated by the Nazi brute."

Adam von Trott was a Prussian aristocrat who studied at Oxford, worked for the German resistance, and was executed by the Nazis in August 1944. I discovered Trott when I was researching wartime Berlin. Christopher Sykes’ biography gives a fascinating portrait of an intense and charming man. His deep loyalty to Germany led him to oppose its government, attempt to reach an understanding with its enemies and participate in an effort to kill its leader.

Adam and his contradictions continue to intrigue me – and I’m not the only one! He pops up regularly in other people’s novels under various aliases: as Hartmann in Robert Harris’ Munich, for instance, and as Axel von Gottberg in Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung.  

This story has won many awards including the Geoffrey Bilson Award for historical fiction but I love it for looking at the German side of World War II, not the battle but the prejudices a 12-year-old Canadian German and a 17-year-old German prisoner of war face in rural Alberta. Karen creates compelling fiction that humanizes instead of demonizes “the enemy.”