"It's early April 1945, deep in the bloodied days of World War II. The Nazi regime is being slowly throttled by the oncoming Russian and Allied armies and Hitler rages uselessly in his Berlin bunker. But the high command have one more throw of the dice to make. An audacious plan is hatched to save the Fatherland and beat off the oncoming apocalypse. All it will take is a hodge-podge squadron of escort fighters, a captured U.S. bomber, and one brave but suicidal pilot to fly it over the Atlantic into the beating heart of America. Half a century later, a rusting plane is discovered, sunk with its crew, off the coast of New York—a relic from a bygone age. Chris Roland, a brilliant young photographer, is sent to take photos of this time capsule. But it is only when he discovers that the fragments of Nazi uniforms on the decaying corpses that he realizes that he has come across a secret so terrible that even 50 years later it could still kill him."
Review:
Where to start?
This is Alex Scarrow's first adult novel (his first book was the first in the TimeRiders teen series, which was published a few months prior) and for a first novel, it's not bad. What mystifies me is that this feels like a first book, where TimeRiders felt like it was written by an experienced author... odd. Another interesting thing about Scarrow is that he tends to write adult novels about topics similar to those he writes about in his TimeRiders books. For example, A Thousand Suns and TimeRiders both had to do with the Nazis, The Candle Man and TimeRiders: City of Shadows both have to do with Victorian England, and Last Light and the future world described in the TimeRiders series sound similar. Interesting. Anyways, back to the task at hand...
A Thousand Suns is a thriller/historical fiction genre fusion, with two major plotlines - the Luftwaffe bomber crew flying the B-17 to New York in 1945 and Chris Roland's exploration of the sunken plane in the modern day. It's a good idea, but Scarrow spends too much time on the bomber crew and not enough on Roland. The book starts by giving Roland a chunk of chapters, then flips to the bomber crew for a little while, and then alternates between individual chapters of Roland's plotline and large chunks of the bomber crew's plotline. The end result is that Roland and the characters in his plotline are underdeveloped and the book is more than a little anticlimactic. I also found Roland as a character to be very annoying in general - he wasn't very likeable at all. The bomber crew's plotline was very very well done though. I really felt for the characters and were cheering them on, which made the ending a little on the sad side. Also, Scarrow needs to work on his American English if he wants to create characters that sound plausibly North American. In A Thousand Suns he actually had American characters saying torch instead of flashlight, which I found downright ridiculous!
All in all, a decent first effort, but only decent - no more. I recommend it to anyone who likes to ask "What if _____ happened during history?"
3/5 stars
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