{"id":3590,"date":"2020-03-09T14:40:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-09T21:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3590"},"modified":"2020-03-09T14:40:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-09T21:40:00","slug":"cara-black-three-hours-in-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/cara-black-three-hours-in-paris\/","title":{"rendered":"Cara Black: Three Hours in Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This book will be available on April 7, 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n

This ticking clock thriller feels like the book Cara Black has long wanted to write, it\u2019s so explosive, so taut, and so impossible to stop reading.\u00a0 The propulsive narrative follows Kate Rees, a young American sent to assassinate Hitler when he visits Paris for three hours in 1940.\u00a0 The set up introduces Kate as she’s waiting with her sniper rifle for Hitler\u2019s appearance; then it goes back in time, very briefly, to establish Kate as a person.\u00a0 She\u2019d been living in Scotland with her Welsh husband and their baby daughter when she loses them both to a German bomb, making her determined to fight the Germans with every bit of herself.<\/p>\n

This look at Kate\u2019s backstory is both narratively efficient and extremely effective as it causes the reader to care about Kate and be completely invested in her. Black then turns her sights to her real objective: telling an hour by hour story of the hunted and the hunter.\u00a0 As it\u2019s 1940 it\u2019s not a spoiler to say Kate misses her target, though she does hit another one, and the Fuhrer wants the shooter found and dispatched.<\/p>\n

This unhappy task falls to Gunter Hoffman, who is given 36 hours to find the shooter.\u00a0 He reluctantly shoves the Steiff bear he\u2019s bought for his daughter\u2019s birthday back into his bag and begins his hunt.\u00a0 The bear becomes almost a totem, and shows up in different ways through the very end of the novel.\u00a0 It\u2019s the kind of specific detail that helps the reader reluctantly understand the mind of a Nazi officer \u2013 to a degree.\u00a0 When both sides of the equation are humanized, it makes the playing field far more interesting.<\/p>\n

Some of Kate\u2019s background detail establishes that she\u2019s a crack shot (thus the sniper assignment), and it shows her being taught the subtle art of disguise.\u00a0 This comes in extremely handy, as things obviously go south pretty quickly.\u00a0 Kate is excellent at thinking on her feet and negotiates her way through a maze of drop sites and contact points, often using her anonymity as a woman to her advantage.<\/p>\n

By turns she disguises herself as a mother pushing a baby buggy, a nurse, an old woman, and a cleaning lady \u2013 all types that tend to be overlooked.\u00a0 While I felt this was deliberate after finishing the book and thinking about it for a while, while I was reading, it didn\u2019t cross my mind.\u00a0 It just seemed like another thing Kate had to do to stay alive and elude the Germans.<\/p>\n

For a thriller to really work, the gears and inner workings of the plot shouldn\u2019t be too apparent.\u00a0 They should just naturally fold into one another in a progression that seems absolutely inevitable.\u00a0 This was definitely the case with this novel.\u00a0 I also approached it, I have to say, somewhat reluctantly, as I was wondering what possible new way could be found to tell the story of occupied (or about to be occupied) Paris.<\/p>\n

But this book, as it turns out, was completely original.\u00a0 Kate is a different type of character and she\u2019s completely mission driven.\u00a0 She thinks practically, fights like a man, and has the skillset of a hunter.\u00a0 The plot never lets up.\u00a0 The characters are made human to the reader, but the main thing is the hunt and the ability of the hunter to locate his prey.<\/p>\n

Read it.\u00a0 There were so many unexpected twists and clever acts of thought and action on Kate\u2019s part I think I will be mulling it over for quite a while.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fabulous change of pace for the talented Cara Black.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This book will be available on April 7, 2020. This ticking clock thriller feels like the book Cara Black has long wanted to write, it\u2019s so explosive, so taut, and so impossible to stop reading.\u00a0 The propulsive narrative follows Kate Rees, a young American sent to assassinate Hitler when he visits Paris for three hours … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[335,10,334,166,13,336,149],"class_list":["post-3590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-cara-black","tag-historical","tag-paris","tag-soho-press","tag-suspensethriller","tag-three-hours-in-paris","tag-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3592,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590\/revisions\/3592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}