Room Full of Night by TR Kenneth/Review by Bill Hopkins
A Room Full of Night
By TR Kenneth
Oceanview Publishing
$26.99
ISBN 978-1608093229
Publication Date: March 5, 2019
BOOK OF THE DAY
A spy novel is the highest form of the thriller genre. A successful spy novel is one that slaps you in the face at the start, then throws you down a greased slide that twists and turns and never lets you go until the end where your destination is a surprise.
You’ll receive that treat when you read TR Kenneth’s first thriller novel, A Room Full of Night.
The premise is that a “determined gimp” winds up in a jigsaw puzzle of death and destruction left over from World War II. After a life full of misery, the point arrives when Stag Maguire “...should have stayed home and re-enacted the family tradition by slipping a needle in his arm and sinking into sweet oblivion.”
Things were horrible for Stag. Then they got worse.
Instead of giving up, though, he offers to help another loser in closing down his bar after it’s been foreclosed by the county sheriff. During the decision-making on what should stay and what should be stolen from the sheriff’s view, the two men find a secret message, crying for help. But the message is on a piece of silk, removed from the back of a picture of a nasty person who may be an ancestor of the bar owner.
The message leads Stag to an apartment in Berlin, where he finds that the National Socialists (i.e., Nazis) are still alive and as dangerous as ever.
Silk played an important part in World War II as a means of sending and receiving secret messages. (That’s explained in the book. No spoilers from me!)
After the discovery that the bad guys are still around, the race is on with the prize being a world free from nuclear war. And such a war would last years, not seconds. As one character points out, “A megaton ground burst [of a nuclear weapon] to the most fertile part of the Great Plains would ...disperse and contaminate the US’s [and Canada’s] most vital food source....”
Who doesn’t love the twists and turns of a conspiracy novel? And this one has a conspiracy going back to World War II that connects with conspiracy in the 21st Century!
That, my friends, is a platinum win!
Buy this book. Read it. Review it.
Bill Hopkins is retired after beginning his legal career in 1971, serving as a private attorney, prosecuting attorney, an administrative law judge, and a trial court judge, all in Missouri. Bill is a member of Horror Writers Association, Heartland Writers Guild, and Sisters In Crime. Bill and his wife, Sharon Woods Hopkins (a mystery writer!), live in Marble Hill, Missouri, with their dogs and cats. Courting Murder was his first novel and his second novel River Mourn won first place in the Best Novel of 2014 from the Missouri Writers Guild.
Learn more about Bill at his website, deadlyduo.net!