The Human Pool

From Publishers Weekly
Conspiracy freaks with nothing to do can pop a Haldol in jubilation upon the publication of this third book from former Time Out London film editor Petit (The Psalm Killer; Back from the Dead). Joe Hoover, a widowed, aging wartime double agent with a mysterious disease, is summoned from Florida to Frankfurt via his old WWII call sign from Karl-Heinz Strasse, a former SS officer, 60 years after the fall of the Third Reich, for reasons that possibly involve the agent's duplicitous (and promiscuous) former boss Betty von Heimendorf. Alongside this tale of wartime pros gathering at journey's end is the tense, sweating parallel story of Vaughan, an English investigative journalist undercover in a group of neo-Nazi skinheads, investigating Karl-Heinz's life story for his boss, a bored media tycoon, while trying to get his mind off his incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Dora. As the story oozes in all directions through an increasingly disjointed series of letters, secret memos and drunken ravings by every member of the shifting cast, Petit conjures up a vague, amorphous hijack of humanity by vested political and economic interests perpetuating a warped biological testing program (on "the human pool") … la Einsatzgruppen. The reader will be lost long before the realization that there is no clear resolution to the novel, just an ever-increasing background volume of paranoia, manifested mainly in poor Vaughan ("The second time I crawled back into the box voluntarily. The third time I didn't come out"). As Hoover himself puts it to the curious Vaughan in the novel's clearest exchange: "Why not leave it alone?" "Because I'll be dead soon and it's about time I knew." Readers may well echo his sentiments. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Petit's third thriller (after The Psalm Killer and Back from the Dead) switches between two different eras. Both worlds are described by several narrators, most notably (for the present) journalist Vaughn, and (for the past and present) Joe Hoover, a former OSS agent. While Vaughn researches neo-Nazis for a documentary filmmaker, Hoover has been called to Frankfurt by Karl-Heinz Strasse, a former Nazi who had ties to spymaster Allen Dulles (later director of the CIA). The reason for Hoover's visit is the possible reappearance of a Swiss courier long thought dead, a man who arranged transport to freedom for Jews and then possibly betrayed them. Underlying this complex scenario is a web of corruption that ties Dulles's wartime activities in Switzerland to German pharmaceutical giant, I.G. Farben, and ultimately to chemical experiments being carried out today on Kurdish orphans. A seamless and intricate interweaving of past and present, and of characters real and fictional, this is recommended for popular fiction collections where spy thrillers are popular. Ronnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, TucsonCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
The Times (London) Ambitious and intelligent....a vivid, violent tale.


Book Description
An epic and hauntingly topical geopolitical thriller spanning six decades and three continents, The Human Pool confirms the journalist and award-winning filmmaker Chris Petit as the heir to John le Carré and Robert Harris. THE HUMAN POOL Rumors about Willi Schmidt's actions during the Second World War were enigmatic, to say the least. He worked for U.S. Intelligence out of Switzerland; he cut black-market deals on the side; he rescued scores of Jews from the Nazis. Saint or sinner? Either way, Schmidt was strictly murky waters -- and reports of his death in 1945 surprised no one. Sixty years later, Joe Hoover is convinced Schmidt is still alive, armed with a false name and a fortune in pharmaceuticals. For years, Hoover, former Intelligence courier for the American spymaster Allen Dulles, has been haunted by misgivings about his own wartime role in his boss's top-secret financial partnership with the Third Reich. Now, someone wants Hoover dead. Back in Europe, Hoover discovers that operations he thought had ended long ago are still being played out. Forming an uneasy alliance with Vaughan, an undercover journalist investigating neo-Nazi traffic of Kurdish refugees, he begins to unravel a conspiracy that leads deep into his past, to his days mixing with Nazi officers in the supposedly neutral cities of Zurich, Istanbul, and Budapest, where enemies did deals over cocktails. At each step, Hoover finds the shadow of Willi Schmidt and the specter of World War II's most grotesque and enduring legacy -- a trade in people: the human pool. Set against a vivid historical backdrop, The Human Pool mixes fiction and fact to explosive effect. Chris Petit has crafted his finest novel yet -- a cosmopolitan, thinking-person's thriller that turns the world inside out and traces its veins: It spells nothing less than the rebirth of the great espionage novel.


Download Description
"An epic and hauntingly topical geopolitical thriller spanning six decades and three continents, The Human Pool confirms the journalist and award-winning filmmaker Chris Petit as the heir to John le Carr? and Robert Harris. THE HUMAN POOL Rumors about Willi Schmidt's actions during the Second World War were enigmatic, to say the least. He worked for U.S. Intelligence out of Switzerland; he cut black-market deals on the side; he rescued scores of Jews from the Nazis. Saint or sinner? Either way, Schmidt was strictly murky waters -- and reports of his death in 1945 surprised no one. Sixty years later, Joe Hoover is convinced Schmidt is still alive, armed with a false name and a fortune in pharmaceuticals. For years, Hoover, former Intelligence courier for the American spymaster Allen Dulles, has been haunted by misgivings about his own wartime role in his boss's top-secret financial partnership with the Third Reich. Now, someone wants Hoover dead. Back in Europe, Hoover discovers that operations he thought had ended long ago are still being played out. Forming an uneasy alliance with Vaughan, an undercover journalist investigating neo-Nazi traffic of Kurdish refugees, he begins to unravel a conspiracy that leads deep into his past, to his days mixing with Nazi officers in the supposedly neutral cities of Zurich, Istanbul, and Budapest, where enemies did deals over cocktails. At each step, Hoover finds the shadow of Willi Schmidt and the specter of World War II's most grotesque and enduring legacy -- a trade in people: the human pool. Set against a vivid historical backdrop, The Human Pool mixes fiction and fact to explosive effect. Chris Petit has crafted his finest novel yet -- a cosmopolitan, thinking-person's thriller that turns the world inside out and traces its veins: It spells nothing less than the rebirth of the great espionage novel. "


About the Author
Chris Petit is the author of The Psalm Killer and Back from the Dead. The former film editor of London's Time Out magazine, his film-directing credits include Radio On and Chinese Boxes, and his documentaries have won several awards. He lives in London.


Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

A poky thriller about Nazis, neo-Nazis, and some seriously flawed good guys slogging around in a geopolitical swamp. Meet grim, gray widower Joe Hoover, our misanthropic hero: his kids don't like him, his grandkids don't like him, and he returns the favor. Things were different in 1942, a time he often harks back to. Then Joe, a package wrapped tighter and brighter, was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence group headed by spymaster Allen Dulles, and sent, undercover, into Germany to pal around with Eichmann, Himmler, and similar unworthies of the Third Reich. Flash forward to the present. Hoover gets a strange phone call from a wartime associate: Karl-Heinz Strasse, the double-agent for whom he was case officer 60 years ago. Karl-Heinz indicates that he has a matter of considerable urgency to discuss, but that he can do so only face-to-face. Hoover-snapping out of his Weltschmerzian fog-sets off for old haunts and a few nostalgic reunions with old spooks. Turns out that Karl-Heinz, a handsome and elegant SS officer in 1942, is now a bloated object of pity whose sense of urgency is often pickled in alcohol. It's through him, however, that Hoover meets Vaughan, a freelance investigative journalist attempting to do a story on Germany's neo-Nazis, in particular Siegfried, "the yuppie Neo." Hoover and Vaughan discover an affinity for each other and become allies in a somewhat desultory war against the darker aspects of the military-industrial complex. To Hoover, it's an old war. How foolish, he tells himself wearily, to think it had been won. Overcomplicated and paced at a crawl, but the real failure in Petit's fourth (after Back from the Dead, 2001, etc.) ischaracterization. To elicit love, hate, or any other active reader response, his people need the creative elbow-grease they don't get here.


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices