What a range Philip Kerr had! The best 'good Nazi' series ever, with Bernie Gunther, supernatural, sci fi, and, with The Shot (1999), perhaps the best Kennedy conspiracy thriller of all time.
Sam Jefferson is an assassin, America's finest. He has carried out hits for the CIA, FBI and even the Mafia, but he doesn't work for any of them. He is independent. Or perhaps, after being a POW in the Korean War, he answers to different masters.
In late 1960 the mob brings him down to Miami to take out Castro and enable them to recoup their Cuban assets. Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli are collaborating, informally, with the CIA. Giancana has just delivered the crucial Chicago vote which enabled John F Kennedy to defeat Nixon in the presidential election. Sam's deal with Kennedy's crooked father Joe is that the Kennedy administration will lay off the Mob.
Sam Jefferson heads for Havana and scopes out the Castro hit. He has no problem moving around the city because he is half Cuban himself. He delivers the feasability study to Johnny Rosselli and promptly absconds with Sam Giancana's money. Giancana therefore hires local FBI man Jimmy Nimmo to track Jefferson down.
Sam meanwhile is working with another Miami FBI staffer Alex Goldman. Together, they are planning to assassinate the president-elect. Why? - I'm not going to say. However, one suggestion is that Sam wants to kill JFK because a mob guy 'accidentally' played him a tape of Kennedy having sex with Sam's wife, who is one of his election staffers. Mary ends up dead soon after. Sam has disappeared, emptying the house of clues.
But Sam has other residences, other names. Franklin Pierce is one of the names he goes by in New York. Sometimes he's Marty van Buren. He has other women in his life, women from Central America.
Attention moves to Jimmy Nimmo's investigation. Nimmo is a likeable character. He tracks down Jefferson's NY apartment. He figures out that Sam is planning to take out Kennedy before the swearing-in on January 20 1961. The question inevitably arises for the reader: We all know when Kennedy was actually taken out, November 22 1963; so how can this fictional version be satisfactorily resolved? BY the supremely capable Philip Kerr, that's how. I didn't fully twig even as it played out on the page in front of me. And I absolutely love it.
Sounds fascinating.
ReplyDelete