Reality is sometimes more incredible and implausible than fiction. Some of history’s biggest absurdities and most unlikely events are undeniably actual things that have happened.
The Traitor: A Novel by Guy Walters presents one such incredible story: too hard to really believe, yet based on an actual situation in WW II.
In WW II, the Nazi's assembled a unit of soldiers and others to be used as a force against the allies. This unit consisted not of Germans, but of British citizens who favored the Nazi cause or who were easily co-oped due to their low intellectual capabilities. At it height, this unit actually consisted of 50 such men.
Their role was to serve in undercover activities such as sabotage where their native English speaking skills could facilitate their undercover functions.
Walters' novel imagines the creation of this unit, creates characters to populate the fictional unit, and involves the unit in a fictional, suspenseful tale of intrigue and double dealings.
The work of actual undercover agents and spies often goes entirely undetected and such agents often die with no credit, recognition, or even acknowledgement of who they were, even when their accomplishments were important and memorable events. They leave reputations as being "traitors" in their wakes.
Within the story of this particular special force comes the story of one of its members' daughters seeking to find out about his work and to clear his name. This part of the story intrudes into the primary text only in short and infrequent passages and seems more of an interruption to the main story than a necessary part of telling it. Moreover, this intrusive text detracts from the ending of the greater tale of the last maneuver Walters imagines for this group of agents, giving the novel a predictable rather than a realistic conclusion.
The story tells of recruiting a leader for this group who has been captured in a failed undercover assignment for the British army. John Lockhart becomes the British agent recruited to be the commander, under his Nazi overseer, Major Carl Strasser of the SS, agreeing to the position because he is convinced he will save the life of his wife who has been arrested in the German invasion of the Netherlands. Besides working to free his wife, he believes he can double cross his captors and be a valuable service to the nation to which he truly loyal, the UK.
Is Lockhart naive or is he just as simple minded as were the real-life members of this unit? The reader will have to come to his own conclusions about this. In either case, it is difficult to believe that anyone who had seen what the Nazis had done could imagine that they could be trusted.
The story casts Lockhart as coming across plans for an intensely powerful chemical agent, sarin--the very real and highly lethal nerve gas, and figuring out how to destroy the stockpile of it the Germans have created and planned to send to London on their new, secret rockets.
Walters makes the story both exciting and almost-plausible, making The Traitor a worthwhile novel. ( )

Not bad but not my type of book. Well written and hangs together well. ( )