Giselle and her husband Felipe are two of the few people who know: Hitler and his wife Eva Braun are alive and still in hiding. Trying to balance the unending search with raising their daughter in 1960s Buenos Aires, Giselle stumbles upon an unlikely lead that sends her and her small team of compatriots on a hunt to verify their most dangerous suspicions.

Stephen Maitland-Lewis’s THE UNLIKELY HUNTRESS draws on the real-life stories of Nazi hunters who brought justice to fugitive criminals in the second half of the 20th century. There’s a lot to like here, including the setting: a 1960s Buenos Aires where “old-world charm and the embers of revolution” still linger. The text is mostly focused on plot, but it still knows how to hinge a scene on a specific, sharp moment. When a German woman describes her handsome ex-boyfriend with the explanation, “Good breeding, you know,” the text lingers on the subtleties and dangers of the statement. An abruptly shortened sentence not only lingers awkwardly, but “[sits] there like an unloaded pistol.” Bits like these build confidence in the storytelling and drive the reader forward.

However, despite its moments of beauty and excitement, THE UNLIKELY HUNTRESS will likely disappoint aficionados of the genre. Not every espionage story needs to rival le Carré or Clancy, but this novel is missing what drives the entire spectrum of spy fiction: tension. There is very little ambiguity and ultimately no surprise in the investigation. All the hunches are correct. Sources turn over sensitive material to total strangers within minutes of meeting them. Civil servants need barely a nudge to accept bribes. An accidental gunshot, nearly two hundred pages into the book, is the first real hitch in the plan; and even from here, everything unravels about as expected. That leaves THE UNLIKELY HUNTRESS with the basic outline of a spy novel or thriller, but without much in the way of thrills. Since the characters are so flat, all the attention is on the plot; and the plot mostly trundles forward in a straight line, at the same steady pace, from start to finish.

Despite these technical flaws, the text nonetheless gets one thing right: moral courage. THE UNLIKELY HUNTRESS has no patience for claims that young people parroting fascist and racist ideologies are “harmless,” or that they’ll grow out of it; nor does it coddle those who have committed no crimes themselves, but have knowingly benefited from the crimes of a system built to privilege them. Those lessons are as true for Nazis in the 1960s as they are for Nazis—and adherents of other hateful ideologies—today.

Stephen Maitland-Lewis’s THE UNLIKELY HUNTRESS has a few exciting moments, but it feels largely like a middle child where nothing is risked or resolved.

~ Dan Accardi for IndieReader