The Afrika Reich: A Novel
Saville’s debut novel makes an energetic leap into alternate history. Britain’s 1940 Dunkirk evacuation fails, and Lord Halifax and Hitler negotiate a peace that includes German control of a vast swath of Africa, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. Fast-forward to 1952, and Walter Hochburg, the psychopathic governor-general of Kongo, is building autobahns through the jungle paved with the ground-up corpses of Nazi soldiers (to plant Nazi spirit in Africa’s very soil). A small team of mercenaries led by Burton Cole, who has a personal score to settle with Hochburg, is hired to assassinate the governor-general, but the mercs are betrayed and pursued relentlessly by Hochburg and hordes of fanatical SS, providing Saville more opportunities for gun battles, carnage, and barbarity than most Hollywood action films. His alternate history is imaginative and superficially plausible; an author’s note cites actual Nazi interest in Africa and its resources. Many readers who study WWII and the Nazis might question this scenario, but, if they can suspend disbelief, they’ll enjoy the wild, running battle against contemporary history’s greatest villains. --Thomas Gaughan