Paul H. Raymer's Blog

Churchill’s Secret Messenger by Alan Hlad is the story of the life and experiences of Rose Teasdale, who begins the book as a typist in Room 60 of Winston Churchill’s underground Cabinet War Rooms in February 1941 on the 159th day of bombing Britain. She is a capable typist and fluent in both English and French, which she speaks like a native because of her French mother’s family. Her brother has been shot down in his Spitfire over the Channel. And one day while she is busy typing, a bomb totals her mother and father’s shop, killing both of them. Churchill sends Rose a personal note sympathizing for her losses.

Some days later, she is brought into Churchill’s private quarters to serve as a substitute interpreter when Churchill is negotiating with General De Gaulle and Commandant Martel. Recognizing her linguistic skills, Churchill has her sent to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Hlad inserts the second narrative point of view with a young Jewish man in Paris called Lazare Aron, who lives in restrained circumstances with his parents as the Nazis terrorize the once beautiful, creative city. Because of an accident, Lazare’s hand was crushed, so he wears a wooden prosthetic, which prevented him from being able to join the French army. He turns his hatred of the occupying army by joining forces with the French Resistance. Rose and Lazare meet and fall in love when she is parachuted into France.

They experienced horrible things that made me wish that the war would end so that the pain and suffering would stop. Hlad’s writing is skillful in inflicting that sort of empathetic anguish. There is a great deal of inner dialog, wondering, wishing, and hoping. And there is much that is repeated, which caused me to skip passages I had seen before.

It is a strong, well-written, and well-researched uncomfortable read.

Janet Beard’s The Atomic City Girls offers a poignant exploration of one of WWII’s lesser-known chapters: the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the young women—nicknamed “Calutron Girls”—who sat behind dials and meters, unaware they were helping build the atomic bomb. The novel follows four narrators—countryside newcomer June Walker, her ambitious roommate Cici, Jewish physicist Sam Cantor, and African‑American laborer Joe Brewer—whose personal trajectories intertwine amid wartime secrecy and moral ambiguity.

Beard skillfully sets the scene of a rapidly constructed community, structured by class, race, and gender hierarchies. Through Joe’s perspective, the novel addresses segregation, prison‑line housing, and under‑recognition, offering one of its strongest and most unsentimental narratives. Meanwhile, June’s arc—from naïve farm girl to someone confronting the weight of complicity—captures the emotional heart of the story. Her romance with Sam begins as escapism, but later becomes a complicated vehicle for truth and hurt, especially as he struggles with guilt and addiction.

That said, the structure is somewhat scattered and the characters underdeveloped. The action switches between stories and points of view too often to get invested in any line. The danger of revelation and punishment is dropped, and the ending wraps up all the stories neatly and artificially.

Despite its promise, the plot leans into soap‑opera dynamics and romance more than the industrial or ethical centrality implied by the title. Still, Beard’s inclusion of period photographs adds immediacy, even if some may find them distracting.

The Atomic City Girls is rich with potential—a historically grounded setting and morally resonant themes—yet it often settles for surface drama over depth. It’s a warm, approachable read, but those hoping for intricate character arcs or deeper insight into Oak Ridge’s secret bureaucracy may feel shortchanged.

John Buchan is most famous for his novel The Thirty-nine Steps which has been adapted for film and television. Mr. Standfast follows the exploits of the same protagonist, Richard Hannay a Scottish engineer, general, and adventurer. He is serving as a general at the beginning of the book, but gets pulled away for a top-secret mission, taking on the undercover role of a pacifist in order to uncover a diabolical, shape-shifting spy. Hannay chases this elusive character all over Scotland and back down into England and finally ends up heading for Switzerland.

It is an elaborate and detailed chase - some of which is dramatic and some of which is slow moving. A number of elements of the tale are connected to previous events and previous characters making it challenging to follow along without taking notes. The story is linked closely to events in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a 1678 Christian allegory. Mr. Standfast is the last pilgrim met by Christiana whom she finds kneeling on the ground and praying “in thanks for having been delivered from the temptation of Madam Bubble”. The Pilgrim’s Progress is used as a code book for passing information, hence the title of this novel.

The time frame of the novel is a bit indeterminate. It was published in 1919 but there is a conspicuous absence of Americans when Hannay returns to the front. Americans entered the war in April of 1917, but Hannay’s beleaguered battalion is relieved by French troops.

This book was appreciated in its time and is interesting from the standpoint of the machinations behind the battles that is far less common than portrayals of face-to-face battles. I didn’t find this book to live up to the promise of the Thirty-nine Steps.

Street by A.D. Metcalfe is an extraordinary novel. It’s the story of 12 year-old Johnny Alvarez who runs away from his abusive home in Miami, gets on a bus, goes to New York, and thrives. Johnny is remarkably adept at survival, parking his few belongs in a tree, spending his first night in Central Park, and then establishing himself in a rundown building in Washington Heights. Johnny’s gang builds and gathers momentum as he makes use of his wits and his language skills.

He does have a problem, however. He was so badly abused by his brother in Miami that he periodically blacks out and loses control sort of like the Hulk. It is a gritty, emotionally resonant coming-of-age story, but it is also a a coming-to-terms story as Johnny struggles to get his internal monster under control.

This must have been a challenging book to write just from the standpoint of seeing the world through the eyes of a twelve-year old boy. People do rise to the challenge and behave beyond their maturity, but Johnny is exceptional. There is no youth in him or his world. What sets this novel apart is its psychological depth. Johnny’s internal struggles—particularly the trauma inflicted by his sadistic older brother—are portrayed with raw honesty. The narrative doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of adolescence, but it also offers moments of levity and camaraderie that make Johnny’s journey feel authentic and human 

Metcalfe blends gritty realism with emotional nuance, creating a story that is both harrowing and hopeful. The prose is sharp, the pacing brisk, and the characters vividly drawn. If you're drawn to stories of resilience, urban survival, and the complexities of youth, Street is a compelling and thought-provoking read.

Published in 2012, The Rope is the 17th Anna Pigeon novel from Nevada Barr. It is the first Nevada Barr novel that I have read, it purports to be the beginning of the Anna Pigeon stories. “It all begins here”, it says on the cover. It’s an interesting beginning.

It's 1995. The story begins at a marina called ‘Dangling Rope’ at the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area with National Park Service personnel hanging around at the end of a work-day. Anna Pigeon is missing from the scene and the reason why she is missing is a mystery. She is mentioned as an odd woman wearing black and saying little.

Anna appears in Chapter 2 at the bottom of a naturally carved ‘solution hole’ in the rocks, naked and with no memory in her fuzz encrusted brain of how she got there, how long she’s been there, or exactly where ‘there’ is. Barr keeps Anna there longer than most readers would feel comfortable with as Anna struggles to figure out her situation and how to escape from it. She cleverly makes use of every option that the situation offers.

Gradually the reader is made aware of Anna’s backstory as Barr shifts the point of view in and out of Anna’s brain as well as the brains of other park employees.

The park employee characters described in the opening chapter are not consistent throughout the rest of the book. A number of traumatic and potentially deadly episodes are strung together to keep the story moving. Barr does a wonderful job of describing the incredible landscapes around Lake Powell and the mysteries of the history of the land that existed before it was all flooded by the creation of the Glen Canyon Dam.

The Rope is a skillful and entertaining tale in the spirit of Paul Doiron and William Kent Krueger.

The foundation of this book derives from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Jim was a slave associated with both Tom and Huckleberry Finn. This book portrays Jim’s life from his point of view - a runaway slave seeking for a way to find his freedom around 1861.

The story begins with Jim chopping wood, stashing a bit away under his mistress’s porch to warm his family’s cabin. He learns that his mistress intends to see him down the river, taking him away from his family. Jim escapes by swimming to a nearby island and his life unravels from there. The book consists of a series of events as Jim moves down and back up the river, from community to community. Everett constructs each event to show the inhumanity showered upon slaves as well as the attitude of the slave toward their ignorant white masters from the slaves use of slave language to having a black man wear black face to sing in a minstrel show.

The story thrives on the irony of the events and situations. The lack of humanity is more than disturbing. A slave is lynched for stealing the stub of a pencil when slaves were not expected to read or write. As Jim transforms to James, his relationship with Huckleberry is clarified.

It is a small world, but some of the interactions seemed contrived - unreal twists of fate. But the book is certainly well written and provides a unique perspective on life.

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This book confused me. In the early pages, I was pretty sure that it was AI generated. If there is any official way to determine if that is true, I don’t know what it is. Whatever system was used, no obvious typos jumped out at me. That in itself may be indicative of the hand of AI. Interestingly, Amazon lists the publisher as the date of publication.

This is a long shoot-em-up novel. There is a mysterious woman who is subjected to a mysterious beginning in the prologue of the book. When Gideon Ryker appears, he is fighting from his life even though he doesn’t remember who is or how he got into a French Foreign Legion retirement community. It turns out that there is a secret massive conspiracy organization (who Slater claims he based on the people behind Jeffrey Epstein) who wants desperately to silence Ryker – although it wasn’t clear to me why they want to do that. There isn’t much depth to the characters, but there is a lot of bloodshed. Slater seems to have a thorough knowledge of weaponry.

It is written well enough that I read it through. He does a decent job of explaining how Ryker gets from point A to point B, picking up money and clothing and weapons as he goes. And Ryker does seem to have a heart, taking pity on an old man who’s car he steals.

This sort of tale would appeal to readers of Lee Child stories, but Jack Reacher has a greater depth of character than Gideon Ryker.

Joe Pickett is a game warden in Wyoming. Like a good protagonist, life isn’t all ‘skittles and beer’ for him. But this book doesn’t begin with Joe Pickett. It begins in the small burg of Encampment, Wyoming where nasty things seem to be going on around the sawmill sawdust burner. It begins with the story of Wylie Frye who is tending to the burner, feeding it sawdust with a bucket loader and checking out messages on his cell phone. The story begins when a truck hits a dog and old Carol Schmidt catches the license plate.

When Joe Pickett enters the story he is waiting for the new governor’s Citation jet at the Saddlestring Municipal Airport. He is met by the governor’s manager who sends him off in a completely unexpected direction to find a missing British PR mogul who has disappeared without a trace. And from there the story marches on through the blinding snow of a Wyoming winter.

There are twenty-six books in the Joe Pickett series and this one was number twenty, published in 2018. Box pushes them out at a rate of one per year. I like the fact that this book stands on its own. Without knowing the details, it makes sense that the story is connected to the preceding Joe Pickett stories, but you don’t have to read them to get to this one.

Joe is a likeable, comfortable, clean living protagonist. He leaves his ugly work to his buddy Nate Romanowski who isn’t adverse to using a frozen trout as a club. Box portrays his characters smoothly and cleanly and the frigid air of the Wyoming winter is abundantly clear and very cold. He reflects the character of his villain through the eyes of a needy side-kick so there isn’t a great deal of depth to him.

But that’s not what the story is about. The story is about Joe Pickett and his family, a dedicated public servant getting his job done despite the barriers of the bureaucracy and the world. And in this book, his job is finding the missing woman. And the reader knows from the beginning that he won’t stop until he gets that done.

The Legend of Moonglade - Book One

In a world where everyone has a living spirit animal to accompany them through their lives and bestow them with special powers, superstition prohibits association with just one animal: a black wolf. Zuri, the protagonist of this tale, is a member of the Wolf Clan and when it comes time for a wolf to select her, a black wolf pup chooses her. And so the clan condemns her to growing up as an outcast.

The world of Akaidia has been divided into clans: Wolf Clan, Serpent Clan, Panther Clan, and Hawk Clan. After the Choosing, the black wolf is expelled from the clan and Zuri is shunned, chosen only for the most menial of tasks. But one day outside of the camp, when Zuri is fourteen, the black wolf finds her and they communicate telepathically. When the clan discovers this relationship, she is chased out to the edge of the cliff that hangs over the ocean. Zuri has to choose whether to stay where she is to be killed by the clan or leap off the cliff to what seems like certain death.

Ms. Raymer handles such cliff hangers with skill. She has created the world that has self-destructed under the influence of an evil power that has divided all the people, separated them into warring clans, and spread them apart while the source of the ultimate evil is trapped but growing ever stronger. Ms. Raymer has populated the world with wise teenagers who use their knowledge and the power of their animals to thrive together despite the blindness of the majority of adults.

This is the first novel for this talented thirteen-year-old author. It is an extraordinary start to what promises to be an exceptional artistic ride. It expresses mature writing skills generated from extensive reading, immersion in the world of fantastic tales, determination, and joy in the journey.

Tana French published this book in 2007 as the first book in the Dublin Murder Squad series. It appears to be her first published novel. I have found that writing is often strange in first novels, so having been introduced to her through The Searcher which she published in 2020, I wanted to see how she had begun. And this was quite a beginning.

French wrote the book in the first person voice of the male narrator, who is a Dublin murder detective whose name varies between Rob Ryan and Adam Ryan. He tells the reader, “What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this - two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”

There are two primary story lines: the first is of three young people playing in the summer sun who take off into the woods next to their housing development outside of Dublin, as they have done many times before. Only this time two of them disappear, and the third one (who turns out to be Adam Ryan) is found clutching a tree with someone else’s blood in his shoes. The second story line is Rob (Adam) returning to the housing development ten years later to investigate the murder of a young girl who is found on top of an ancient sacrificial stone. A highway is about to be built through the ancient site and some people don’t want that to happen.

There are lots of threads of emotional entanglements and distress. Adam has changed his name to Rob in order to avoid curious questions about the events ten years earlier.

Tana French’s writing is as rich as a death-by-chocolate cake. The psychological aspects of this book are disturbing, and the pace seemed slow as lead after lead came to a dead end. But by the time I finished the book, I understood it had to be written the way it was written in order to build the troubled natures of the characters. It clearly fits into the police mystery/psychological genres, and I will keep it on my reference shelf just for the way French handles the suspect interviews.

I will also keep it on my reference shelf for the truly most evil character I have ever met in a work of fiction. Another reviewer compared this book to Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which had also occurred to me as I was reading it. I wonder if Tana French had to turn away from that character who seems a bit thinly developed compared to others in the novel. To truly develop that character would have meant getting inside it and truly seeing the world through its eyes. (I am avoiding the defining the gender of the character to avoid spoiling the story.)

Getting inside the head of a truly evil character is scary as hell.

This is not a quick read, but this is another five star novel from Tana French.