The Bottom Line: A meticulously plotted WWII thriller where the battle for Britain moves from the skies to Whitehall.
Set during World War II, opens as London is in disarray. German bombing raids have turned it into a city of blackouts, rubble and shortages. Against that instability, MI6 agent Katrin Nissen faces an enemy operating inside Britain’s own institutions. Katrin’s husband and fellow intelligence operative, John Breckenridge, returns wounded after helping thwart an assassination attempt on British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.Â
Author Karen K. Brees establishes Katrin firmly as the novel’s emotional and investigative center, even as John conducts an important parallel inquiry of his own. Not knowing whom to trust, she begins trying to determine how deeply the enemy has penetrated the government and who is behind the attempt on Churchill. Brees makes a strong authorial choice in turning that institutional uncertainty into a chain of increasingly personal threats.
Before John leaves London on an escort mission that will bring him home aboard the Western Prince under an assumed name, he hides a warning for Katrin telling her not to believe whatever she hears about him. When the ship is torpedoed and another survivor emerges using John’s cover identity, Katrin has a crucial clue but no safe institution through which to pursue it. Then her own position collapses: she is drugged, wakes at the scene of a colleague’s murder and finds evidence arranged to implicate her. A small inconsistency suggests the scene has been staged, but proving that is another matter.
Her prose is direct and accessible, with flashes of dry humor that keep the novel from becoming relentlessly grim. What she does especially well is make the machinery of wartime life serve the suspense. The book’s finer details are not just period decoration, they isntead become tools that can conceal, expose or endanger people. Practical details and seemingly incidental encounters often acquire investigative weight.
The stakes soon expand beyond Katrin’s frame-up and John’s stolen identity. Westwind is sprawling, fully embracing the scale of the World War II historical thriller as it moves between personal espionage, political conspiracy and occupied Europe without abandoning the smaller clues that launched the investigation. Brees also has a significant reveal in reserve concerning how apparently separate identities and operations fit together, along with reversals that make earlier details worth reconsidering.
As Book Four in the series, Westwind carries the accumulated history of established relationships, and some secondary figures arrive with less reintroduction than a newcomer might want. Readers are urged to start the series with Book 1 as Brees juggles a large cast of characters, aliases, agencies and parallel schemes.
