Munich Signature (The Zion Covenant, Book 3)

I absolutely love this book and the entire series! Brock and Bodie Thoene bring the perils of World War II to life. They have given us individual names and faces to the horror that thousands faced as they were persecuted by Hitler and his henchmen for a myriad of reasons. I started reading this series in junior high and even now (almost 20 years later) I'm still having trouble turning off my light at night because I'm so engrossed in the story! This book in particular radiates the message that the power of music can, indeed, carry us through the worst of times. It's tragic and heartbreaking yet makes us want to cheer all at the same time. I'm reading this one right now, and even though I already know what's going to happen I'm still waiting eagerly to go through it all again with the main characters.

German-born violinist Elisa Linder (or Lindheim) and American journalist John Murphy have turned their marriage of convenience into a real union, at last. Elisa's family has found safe haven in Prague. Her close friend Leah Feldstein is on the way to Italy, via the dangerous passes from Austria, while Shimon Feldstein - Leah's husband - suffers as a slave laborer in a Nazi steel mill. Leah shepherds one of the five-year-old twin boys rescued from the Nazis in an earlier volume of this series. The other twin, Charles, travels with Elisa and her husband. The boys' parents have been murdered, and little Charles marked as a "mutant" unfit to live because of his harelip. Which a Jewish physician who has already fled Germany for New York City waits to repair, as soon as Elisa and Murphy bring the child to him. That's where this third installment of the Zion Covenant series begins. It ends with Britain's Prime Minister Chamberlain and other, like-minded government officials turning the Sudetenland over to Hitler without a fight, in order to achieve "peace in our time." Munich Signature introduces a new and powerful character in Trudence "Bubbe" (Grandmother) Rosenfelt, a 78-year-old widow who married a Hamburg man and raised her family there. Her family in Hamburg now consists of a married granddaughter, that granddaughter's husband, and their five small daughters. Bubbe Rosenfelt will not use her U.S. citizenship to return home to Brooklyn, New York until she finds a way to get her loved ones out of Germany, and the roadblocks she encounters are only partly of German construction. American unwillingness to bend rigid quotas and other immigration rules proves far harder to overcome than Nazi unwillingness (real though it is) to let the Jews escape Hitler's plans for a final solution. There may be a way, though, Mrs. Rosenfelt learns when she persists in troubling a U.S. Embassy official. If she has enough money to pay outrageous fees for their passage, and if her family is willing to board a rusting, incredibly overcrowded freighter. Meanwhile, both the Gestapo and British Intelligence stalk Elisa, because the latter organization recognizes how useful this woman can be if compelled to serve as an operative. Once again Bodie and Brock Thoene produce a fast-paced, emotionally stirring tale based solidly on real events. Their characters, while fictitious, feel just as real. I was particularly impressed in this book by John Murphy's gradual inner journey from cheerful disregard for the religion of his childhood to actively seeking God's help. While the book's text sometimes does lapse into preaching (which will please some readers while annoying others), there is nothing "preachy" about Murphy's transformation by God's grace. It happens naturally, in a fine example of how character development ought to be handled in any novel. --Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of HIGH PLACES and 2005 EPPIE winner REGS

Book arrived quickly and in shape described. I am very satisfied with the seller. Thanks.

I had to read the first book in the series, Vienna Prelude, for a summer reading book for my school. I enjoyed the book so much that i have continued to read the rest of the series. This is one of those books that you really put your heart into, the authors did a very good job of getting the research, and then adding into the book their own insight. You come to love the characters, and when one is hurt, you feel the pain. In fact, on several occasions it has moved me to tears. You want to keep reading to find out what happens to the little coffin ship, The Darien, with all the Jewish refugees on it and nowhere to go. And all the other charecters you have came to love, you read further into, several of them surprising you with their actions. In a few places it does seem to get a little slow, but for the most part it is a deeply touching book.

Bodie and Brock Thoene have written a moving description of the pain and terror of the Nazi occupation of Vienna and their impending blitz of Prague. The characters have been fleshed out so well in the first two novels in the series, that I felt as if I was standing on the street watching it happen. For me that is the best. It does get a little slow in places. Mostly because you want to get to the next page and see what happened. They pull in characters from the past novels that you had forgotten about and continue their story and if you had never left them. Otto, a seemingly bitter Tyrolean, has joined the Nazi movement and has risen in the ranks. When his path crosses Elisa's again, the results are surprising. There are stories about Christians helping Jews, Jews escaping on a decrepit old ship and their courage in the face of ridicule and rejection from the human race. Then there is Murphy a journalist, who has seen it all, on a lone crusade. Fiction blends with life and reality with total disbelief at what the world knew and refused to deal with. Brock is a digger of facts and it is obvious in his wife's writing. I come away from every book in the series hungry for more and even more knowledgeable about our past and the possibility of our future. The team takes you to places you've heard about and wanted to visit. They turn you upside down and forever change how you see out world. I would suggest this book to anyone who wants to know the real of what our country, as well as the rest of the world did or didn't do for the people being massacred in Hitler's Reich.