Invitation to Valhalla

It's great when you have one you can't put down. They don't come along often enough. By the time you are half-way through this book you might as well forget about going to bed.

I could not put this book down, and I have since ordered a number of copies as gifts for family and friends. Every person to whom I have given the book has loved it also. Several have told me they lost sleep because they could not quit reading it. I highly recommend Invitation to Valhalla, both for its historical content about a little-known WWII event and for its excellent suspense writing.

Although I live in Evansville (the city at the heart of the novel), I had to be turned on to Invitation to Valhalla by someone on the other side of the world. The recommendation I received, from a friend in Australia, demonstrates the story's universal appeal. I am not usually a fan of the genre, but Invitation was so brilliant I read it three times in a row. Everything from the setting to the characters is brilliant, and obviously painstaking research makes the story undeniably accurate. The approach Whicker takes is refreshingly open. The Nazis are simply Nazis, not glorified or sympathetic, but not demonized either. The metallurgist Mayer is not made to be an impossibly pious representation of his people; this is becoming increasingly rare in books dealing with the era. The heroes are heroes because of their actions, and the villains are such for the same reason. I enjoyed the novel as a Midwesterner, a Jew, and as a historian. Most of all however, I enjoyed the novel as a book lover. You will enjoy this book, and like me you will be waiting anxiously for a second helping of Whicker.