In THE LAST RIVAL: A TIME OF OUR CHOOSING, Kyle Palmer addresses the possibility of an alternate history in which Adolf Hitler escaped—leaving a body double to commit suicide in his place. In order to address the threat of a resurgent Fourth Reich, a crack team of military operatives and scientific geniuses assembles to seek out and hunt down the “late” Fuhrer and his remaining followers.

THE LAST RIVAL takes a bit of time to get started, but the last half is a nonstop whirl of energy and activity—with twist after twist keeping the reader engaged until the final climax. There’s no shortage of violence here, but there’s also a sense that violence must be properly channeled into the service of the right and good. There’s a refreshing, starry-eyed idealism here: a clear and thorough conviction that there is a defined good and evil, and that Nazis are firmly on the evil side; that honorable devotion to patriotism and service to one’s country will always be rewarded, even if kept secret; and that people who dedicate themselves completely to a noble cause can achieve anything they set their minds to.

However, the writing is so full of dramatic flourishes and purple prose that it’s hard to take it seriously in places. When the writer waxes eloquent on everything, even describing a simple tarp as “a steadfast shield against the unpredictable whims of the Sky,” the writing becomes repetitive, even silly, and loses a good portion of its dramatic effect. Brand names are so frequently sprinkled into the writing that one almost suspects the author of sponsorship deals: “A perfect pair, each man wore Filson tin jackets, Red Wing boots, and Wilson aviator sunglasses, their look completed by glowing Lucky Strike cigarettes.”

There’s also a tone of preachiness, which can interrupt even the most energetic action sequences. The religious preachiness in particular feels awkwardly shoehorned in (especially when the author is putting Christian ideas into the mouth of a Jewish atheist scientist, which seems in particularly bad taste given the use of Christianity in Hitler’s Germany to persecute and murder Jews). The e-book has inconsistent spacing of paragraphs and pages, such that some mid-chapter pages have only a sentence or a part of a sentence, and the first two sentences of paragraphs tend to be center-justified while the rest are left-justified. An editor could help here, especially with respect to choppy incomplete sentences and an occasional tendency to use apostrophes to make plurals (“Nazi’s” instead of “Nazis”).

Still, for readers wanting a fresh breath of patriotism and honor wrapped in an action-filled package, THE LAST RIVAL makes for an entertaining read.

Although it’s somewhat hampered by excessive descriptions and a preachy tone, Kyle Palmer’s THE LAST RIVAL: A TIME OF OUR CHOOSING is a dramatic action-adventure story with a hearty and encouraging message about what can be achieved with faith, courage, and true patriotism.

~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader