GRAHAM HURLEY'S FINISTERRE

It's September 1944.The writing is on the wall for the Nazis, and the French port of Brest, has fallen to the allies. Kapitan Stefan Portisch is taking U-2553, one of the new, shoddy, prefabricated submarines created out of wartime shortages, through the Bay of Biscay on a special mission. He's got no torpedos, but instead five SS officers and a cargo of crates which he's carrying to Lisbon. Until they hit a storm, the ship gets damaged, and Portisch, the only survivor, is washed up in a small town in Spain.

Meanwhile in New Mexico, as the Manhattan Project proceeds feverishly, one of the scientists, Sol Fielder, has been found dead in his house, an apparent suicide. Hector Gomez, ex-FBI and now with Army Intelligence, begins his investigation, and discovers that the Army wants it put to bed quickly, so the project can move on. But of course it goes deeper than they want to know, and in the end very deep indeed.

How these two stories merge together is the dual spine of this intriguing novel, which was the first in Hurley's 'Wars Within' series. How he pulls off the melding of a murder mystery on one continent and a spy thriller with overtones of For Whom The Bell Tolls on the other is revealing. Hurley switches back and forth, doing a subtle but effective change of tone between those stories. The two protagonists are very different characters, and to some extent they are both outsiders in situations where they cannot fit comfortably. But Gomez has an immediate aim, while Portisch, looking simply to leave the pain of war, needs to find his. It's also interesting that their immediate link is romance, as both Portisch and Gomez encounter women whose help they need, but whom they have to risk trusting. To anyone familiar with Hurley's crime novels, featuring Joe Faraday or Jimmy Suttle, that intimate trust is often a metaphor for the bigger stories, one which must be resolved just as the key plot must be.

Finisterre means 'end of the earth'. As with Hurley's Estocada, third and latest of the Wars Within series (see my review here), the title carries its deeper meaning. That novel also was set-up with two converging plot lines. I actually like this one better, mostly for its combination of pace and depth, and for the way the stories are brought together in a way that makes this a superb espionage story as well as a fine thriller.

Just two queries: Gomez had been an FBI agent before joining Army Intelligence, and his FBI contacts are essential to the story. But my belief was that, although minorities had served in the Bureau of Investigation, after J. Edgar Hoover took over they were blacklisted, though it is true that during World War II, needing more agents and some who could speak Spanish to deal with the fear of Germans using Mexico, Hispanics were brought in. And oddly enough, the soda pop Mountain Dew appears in both New Mexico and Mexico proper. But Mountain Dew, like most pops at the time, was a regional thing around Tennessee (I know, I am sad for even knowing this) and didn't go national until the 1960s. Let me point out neither point really matters to the story (the soda pop not at all!) and few readers are as sad as I am not notice or care. And by the way, Portisch is a whole lot better looking than the UBoat captain on the cover.

Finisterre by Graham Hurley
Head Of Zeus, £18.99 ISBN 9781784977818

GRAHAM HURLEY'S ESTOCADA

It's 1937 and Dieter Merz is the ace of the Condor Legion, flying the new Messerschmidt 109 against Russian planes in the Spanish Civil War, called Der Kleine, the Little One. Toward the end of that year, Tom Moncrieff, an ex-Marine fluent in German, and trying to make his father's estate in the Highlands into a shooting resort, is recruited by a shadowy part of British intelligence, to gather information about the Germans and their plans regarding the Sudetenland.

It's 1938, and Dieter, having been injured seriously in a crash, is a celebrity and has been sent to Japan to gather information about Japan's aerial strength. He meets Keiko, the sister of a Japanese flyer, who is able to nurse his cracked bones back to health. Meanwhile Tam is in Czechoslovakia with the wife of a Jewish Czech refugee, trying to gauge how strong the push back against a German advance might be.

Graham Hurley is one of Britain's most under-appreciated thriller writers. His series of Faraday and Winter were as good as any of the British lonely detectives, helped by the uneasy balance of the two main characters, and their picture of Portsmouth depended on Hurley's pin-point characterisation, built on an empathic understanding of even the worst of them. Now he's turned his hand to thriller set around World War II, of which Estocada is the third, which provides him with more chances to challenge that ability to define venal characters, and to explore their ambiguities. His portrayals of Goering, Ribbentrop and Hitler himself catch edges of each man that aren't typical, but bring them to life in a completely non-mythic way.

The plot, of course, brings Dieter and Tam together, in Berlin , still in 1938 but with war on everyone's minds. But in Estocada (a word Dieter picked up in Spain, meaning the matador's death-strike on the bull) the focus is the way this impending conflict affects the lives of those involved. Not just our dual protagonists, but their friends, the victims they encounter, and especially those they love.

Behind the usual tense questions and rushes against time you'd expect from a thriller, and the dangerous spy turf of Nazi Germany, the heart of this book is the question of just how committed one can be, how necessary it may be to have something more powerful than oneself in which to belief and for which to live and die. Like many of Hurley's novels, regardless of their milieu, this is a book about compassion and human values. As such it gets beneath the usual tropes of his latest genre, and is an engrossing read.

Estocada by Graham Hurley
Head Of Zeus, £18.99, ISBN 9781784977894

note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)