Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Set in the spy-infested capital of Argentina in 1943, Griffin's newest is a sequel to Honor Bound (1994) and adheres to the author's usual recipe of good guys, bad women and broad but sometimes transparent suspense and melodrama. Clete Frade is a Marine Corps aviator, a hero of Guadalcanal. Wealthy and well connected, he is also a spook for the OSS and perfect for an undercover job in Buenos Aires because he's an Argentine citizen. Assisted by two useless Army buddies, a navy chief who considers himself a gaucho and a loyal Argentine bodyguard, Frade is sent south to sniff out both a suspected plot to overthrow the Argentine government and a report of a Nazi ship using Argentine waters to resupply German submarines. He stumbles into much more, however, with the assassination of his Argentine father, who is the leader of the coup plot, and with his discovery of a Nazi scheme to ransom Jews out of Dachau and to use the money to finance a sanctuary for fugitive Nazis should Germany lose the war. Frade spars with diplomats, spies, his OSS boss, the FBI, the Argentine military and an SS colonel, all the while trying to aid one conspiracy and destroy the others. There's no deep moral digging here as there is in, say, le Carr. But Griffin is a savvy old hand and here, working with an exotic setting and a complex plot, delivers the sort of sturdy entertainment his fans expect.
Library Journal
Guns, honor, and guts mark this sequelas well as just about all of Griffin's outputto the author's best-selling military novel, Honor Bound.
Kirkus Reviews
A rousing sequel to the prolific Griffin's Honor Bound (1994), which introduced Cletus Howell Frade, a US Marine Corps fighter pilot (born in Argentina to an American mother) on assignment for the OSS in WW II Buenos Aires.
This time out, Clete heads back to neutral Argentina in the spring of 1943 after an extended leave spent with his maternal grandfather, an autocratic oil tycoon. Ostensibly returning to bury his father (a wealthy colonel assassinated by Nazi agents fearful that he might overthrow the Castillo regime and take Argentina to war on the side of the Allies), Clete remains under orders from the cloak-and-dagger crowd. His mission: to keep a noncombatant vessel from using Argentina's coastal waters to rearm and refuel German U- boats on patrol in the South Atlantic. Fluent in Spanish, the personable young leatherneck moves in the capital city's highest social and military circles. While scheming how to do his duty without causing an international incident, Clete is tipped off by a Luftwaffe chum attached to the Third Reich's embassy that the supply ship will be carrying a massive amount of money earmarked to establish Nazi brass in postwar South America. A member of his undercover team also learns of a big-money racket whereby Jews may be ransomed from European death camps and resettled in Latin nations like Uruguay. With time out to put his flying skills at the disposal of insurgent Argentinean officers (whose ranks include Juan Domingo Perón) in their successful coup, and to help plan a wedding that will unite him with the high-born señorita he has made great with child, Clete finds a way to turn the tables on the villainous Nazis without upsetting any diplomatic applecarts; and he manages also to exact a satisfactory measure of revenge for the untimely death of his father.
An immensely entertaining adventure set in an equally intriguing milieu.
