An epic and hauntingly topical thriller, spanning six decades and three continents, 'The Human Pool' confirms Chris Petit as the heir to John le Carre and Len Deighton.
Rumours about Willi Schmidt's activities during the war were enigmatic, to say the least. He traded blackmarket leather for Nazi boots, and information for US intelligence; he may have traded in Jews for both. Saint or sinner? Either way, Willi was strictly murky waters, and reports of his death in 1945 surprised no-one.
Almost sixty years later, two men think Willi Schmidt might still be alive, armed with a false name and a fortune in pharmaceuticals. One is a former SS officer who served under Himmler, now living in Frankfurt. The other is Joe Hoover, ex-bagman for the American spymaster Alan Dulles, who has long been haunted by his role in his boss's top-secret financial partnership with the Third Reich. Now, it seems, someone wants Hoover dead.
Back in Frankfurt it seems that operations which were meant to have ended long ago are still being played out. In uneasy alliance with an undercover journalist investigating the neo-Nazi traffic of Kurdish refugees, Hoover begins to unravel a conspiracy that leads deep into his past - to the days when he mixed with Nazi officers in the supposedly neutral cities of Zurich, Istanbul and Budapest, where enemies did deals over cocktails.
At each step, they find the shadow of Willi Schmidt and the spectre of WWII's most grotesque and enduring legacy - a trade in people. The human pool.
Chris Petit's masterly new novel turns the world inside out and traces its veins. 'The Human Pool' is a cosmopolitan, thinking-person's thriller that interweaves fact and fiction to spellbinding effect, unpicking history and redefining our understanding of the way war and business merge.
