A Room Full of Night

Image of A Room Full of Night
Author(s): 
Release Date: 
March 5, 2019
Publisher/Imprint: 
Oceanview Publishing
Pages: 
320
Reviewed by: 

“an entertaining, imaginative piece of fiction, filled with enough historical facts to make it seem it could actually be true.”

All Stag McGuire planned was to help his friend, Harry, remove the painting of the old German from Gerde’s Biergarten. The bar had been there for three generations but now through bad luck or incompetency or whatever, it was closed. Forever. The picture had hung behind the bar from the beginning and his friend wanted to keep it. It’s only after they remove it that they discover it’s been painted over. Underneath is a portrait of a Nazi officer, and the strip of torn silk hidden beneath the frame holds a plea:  Help Me, and a message, The diamonds are in a truck in the lake. There’s also a key and an address.

Reporter Stag hasn’t been interested in anything since his wife died by a robber’s bullet during a bank heist. Now his journalistic instincts come alive, as well as his curiosity.

Who wrote the note? Does the place the key opens still exist?

A phone call to the address verifies it’s an apartment, and it’s still there. Unoccupied. The concierge at the apartment building won’t tell him more, but Stag’s call opens a long-closed can of deadly worms.

Shortly after, Harry dies of a heart attack, though he claims he was stabbed by an unknown assailant, but there are no wounds. Stag travels to Germany to the apartment building and finds a way in. There he discovers an apartment frozen in time, looking as it did the day its tenant, Isolde, left it 76 years before. He also finds her diary, written in code in the margins of a copy of Mein Kampf. From it, he learns that Isolde was a u-boat, a Jew who went underground to hide her identity. She was also mistress of Rheinhard Heydrich, head of the SS, and the story she tells could become the biggest scoop the disillusioned newsman has ever written.

 If he lives to tell it.

There’s a consortium of powerful men who’ll kill to know what’s in that diary, and they’ve set assassins and a deadly mystery woman on Stag’s trail.

Stag’s determined to learn Isolde’s fate, outwit his stalkers, and above all, stay alive. Which of the three will be manage?

Alternating between Isolde’s journal entries and Stag’s attempts to trace the clues left in her diary, this is an intriguing and well written postwar thriller. Author Kenneth has not only created a fictional history of what might have happened if Isolde truly existed, but he’s also penned a clever thriller of how her existence might have influenced the war. A Room Full of Night is an entertaining, imaginative piece of fiction, filled with enough historical facts to make it seem it could actually be true.