Fiction: The Arms Maker of Berlin

FICTION

Judging by the unending flow of books, movies and television series, World War II is still being fought. But, as Dan Fesperman shows in his absorbing new espionage novel, "The Arms Maker of Berlin," there continue to be war stories worth telling.

Like John Le Carre, Fesperman is a writer who emphasizes motive and character rather than firepower, though there is a high-enough body count to satisfy action addicts. Grounded in research and careful documentation, his novels offer fictionalized accounts of actual events. This time around, he links the German resistance group, the White Rose, with Kurt Bauer, an aging arms maker whose family provided Hitler with weapons and after the war became a major appliance as well as arms manufacturer.

The protagonist is historian Nat Turnbull, whose field is the German underground and the members who betrayed it. He believes, with his mentor and now retired fellow historian Gordon Wolfe, "that scoundrels, not heroes, were the driving forces of history, and thus worthy of greater scrutiny."

When Wolfe, a member of the original OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, is arrested because the FBI alleges that he stole some top-secret files, Turnbull is asked by the FBI to examine the files found in Wolfe's home in the Adirondacks. Turnbull suspects they might reveal more about the doomed White Rose group, as well as Wolfe's own role in the underground.

But Wolfe dies in jail, and Turnbull must dig deeper and wider -- he travels to Switzerland as well as Berlin -- to find out who betrayed the White Rose and what Wolfe was doing back then. The FBI, Turnbull soon learns, is really interested in the role of Bauer, now in his 80s, and long suspected of selling nuclear equipment to North Korea and Iran.

Moving back and forth from wartime Berlin, where the young Bauer fell in love with Liesl, a White Rose member, to the present, where Turnbull follows leads and explores old secrets, Fesperman tells a story that vividly evokes the tensions of wartime and contemporary espionage.

As Turnbull learns how duty fatally conflicted with love, fear with honor -- and that betrayal is the price of survival, then, now and in days of the Stasi in East Germany -- he also reflects on his own life.

This is a thriller that entertains as well as enlightens by a writer who does his homework.

Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.