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Synopsis
THE HUMAN POOL
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About the Author
Chris Petit is the author of the critically and commercially successful THE PSALM KILLER and BACK FROM THE DEAD. The former film editor of TIME OUT, he is currently the thriller reviewer for the GUARDIAN. His film directing credits include RADIO ON; FLIGHT TO BERLIN; AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN and CHINESE BOXES. He lives in London.
From Publishers Weekly
Conspiracy freaks with nothing to do can pop a Haldol in jubilation upon the publication of this third book from former Time Out London film editor Petit (The Psalm Killer; Back from the Dead). Joe Hoover, a widowed, aging wartime double agent with a mysterious disease, is summoned from Florida to Frankfurt via his old WWII call sign from Karl-Heinz Strasse, a former SS officer, 60 years after the fall of the Third Reich, for reasons that possibly involve the agent's duplicitous (and promiscuous) former boss Betty von Heimendorf. Alongside this tale of wartime pros gathering at journey's end is the tense, sweating parallel story of Vaughan, an English investigative journalist undercover in a group of neo-Nazi skinheads, investigating Karl-Heinz's life story for his boss, a bored media tycoon, while trying to get his mind off his incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Dora. As the story oozes in all directions through an increasingly disjointed series of letters, secret memos and drunken ravings by every member of the shifting cast, Petit conjures up a vague, amorphous hijack of humanity by vested political and economic interests perpetuating a warped biological testing program (on "the human pool") ... la Einsatzgruppen. The reader will be lost long before the realization that there is no clear resolution to the novel, just an ever-increasing background volume of paranoia, manifested mainly in poor Vaughan ("The second time I crawled back into the box voluntarily. The third time I didn't come out"). As Hoover himself puts it to the curious Vaughan in the novel's clearest exchange: "Why not leave it alone?" "Because I'll be dead soon and it's about time I knew." Readers may well echo his sentiments.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherAustralia: Scribner, 2002
- ISBN 10 0743231198
- ISBN 13 9780743231190
- BindingPaperback
- Rating
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The Human Pool
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HUMAN POOL
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Scribner, New York, 2003
ISBN 10: 0743231198
ISBN 13: 9780743231190
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Paperback. First Paperback Edition. Very Good with no dust jacket; Edgewear. Creases in spine. ; Mass Market PB; 481 pages. Seller Inventory # 33726
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The human pool - Chris Petit
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The Human Pool
Seller: Bookbot, Prague, Czech Republic
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Condition: Fine. During the war, Joe Hoover worked for the American intelligence service. Karl-Heinz Strasse worked for the SS. The two should never have met, but they became the closest of associates, communicating in the supposedly neutral cities of Zurich, Istanbul and Budapest. In 1945, all the secrets were buried. But sixty years later, a man they thought was dead seems to have resurfaced. Willi Schmidt played both sides, dealing in intelligence, in black-market goods, in pharmaceuticals. When Hoover returns to Europe to try and track him down, he discovers that operations he thought had ended long ago are still being played out. At each step into his past, he is haunted by the shadow of Willi Schmidt and the spectre of WWII's most grotesque and enduring legacy - a trade in people. Chris Petit's masterly new novel turns the world inside out and traces its veins. THE HUMAN POOL interweaves fact and fiction to spellbinding effect, unpicking history and redefining our understanding of the way war and business merge. Seller Inventory # 037cfb42-1c91-4891-a3e3-ae3bf59b66ac
Quantity: 1 available