Over 70 years have passed since the second World War and people cannot stop writing about this impacting time in history. In the spy thriller Three Hours in Paris, Cara Black puts a woman into the spotlight who has the tools to get rid of Hitler once and for all.
Kate Rees is young, married, and a mother to an 18 month old baby. She met her husband in Paris, who took this young American female with him to England. Life is perfect. Until one day, a Nazi bomb kills her husband and child in front of her. In the middle of her overwhelming grief, the British intelligence makes her an offer she cannot refuse. Growing up on a ranch, she knows how to use a rifle and as a woman, she can easily blend in because no one would suspect a woman to assassinate Hitler.
After some training, she is sent to Paris to eliminate her target. Unfortunately, she does not succeed. Thinking that everything has been a set up and she only was the distraction for another plan, she has to run for her life and find her way back to England before the Nazis catch her.
I like the idea that a woman has the fate of the world in her hands as we all know this wasn’t the case for the majority of women who instead had to keep things running instead. I can only imagine how many people would have wished for the chance that Black has given her protagonist.
Unlike European women at that time, Kate knows how to defend herself and knows what independence is, thanks to where she comes from. Of course, she took her chance to get revenge when she got the offer, but went in blind despite the little training she got.
For most of the book, it seems that her superior does not trust her and that she is expendable. Being stranded in another country with no help while the villain is all around her, Kate tries her best to navigate her way out using old and new contacts. For this short amount of time, an awful lot has happened and it was a bit intense to follow.
While the story starts with Kate’s point of view, it moves back and forth to the POV of Gunter, the man who received the mission from Hitler to find the assassin who tried to kill him. It gave me the impression that he is not fully convinced of Hitler’s plan for the future of Europe, but yet he still tries to fulfil his wishes.
After everything that happens over the course of the book, the ending gives you the conclusion which you slowly start to see while you read.
Despite the other fiction books I have read that also take place within this time period, this is one of the most well-written ones. It moves fast and confronts you with many new characters and situations, causing you to concentrate quite a bit, but this only makes you more invested in the story.
Living in the middle of Europe with ancestors who had to face Nazis, this historical event is very important to me. I recently heard that according to a study pool, not many people know what the Second World War was about and its aftermath. I refuse to believe that this is actually true, but if so, then books like this, fiction or not, are important to be written and read.
Three Hours In Paris is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of April 7th 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
In June of 1940, when Paris fell to the Nazis, Hitler spent a total of three hours in the City of Light—abruptly leaving, never to return. To this day, no one knows why.
The New York Times bestselling author of the Aimée Leduc investigations reimagines history in her masterful, pulse-pounding spy thriller, Three Hours in Paris.
Kate Rees, a young American markswoman, has been recruited by British intelligence to drop into Paris with a dangerous assignment: assassinate the Führer. Wrecked by grief after a Luftwaffe bombing killed her husband and infant daughter, she is armed with a rifle, a vendetta, and a fierce resolve. But other than rushed and rudimentary instruction, she has no formal spy training. Thrust into the red-hot center of the war, a country girl from rural Oregon finds herself holding the fate of the world in her hands. When Kate misses her mark and the plan unravels, Kate is on the run for her life—all the time wrestling with the suspicion that the whole operation was a set-up.
Cara Black, doyenne of the Parisian crime novel, is at her best as she brings Occupation-era France to vivid life in this gripping story about one young woman with the temerity—and drive—to take on Hitler himself.
