Just finished reading...

A Night of Long Knives by Rebecca Cantrell.

I've been waiting anxiously for this sequel to A Trace of Smoke, and so was thrilled when I received an ARC from the author.

Hannah's story continues three years after Smoke. As a travel writer for a Swiss magazine, she is describing the Graf Zeppelin's journey from Brazil to Switzerland. Nearly at their destination, Hannah sees a lake below, and knows that they have veered off course. Immediately suspicious, she and Anton escape through a rear window. Unfortunately, their flight was expected, and they are chloroformed and taken to Nazi officer Ernst Rohm.

Rohm believes that Anton is his son, and is determined to raise him. He also has a plan for Hannah, which she learns when she wakes up in his hotel room. When there is a knock on the door, he makes her hide in the bathroom, so she is able to watch through a crack in the door while he has arrested by Adolf Hitler.

After they leave, she sneaks out, looking for Anton, but is unable to find him. She follows Hitler's convoy and though she speaks with Rohm briefly before he is killed, is unable to learn the whereabouts of the boy she thinks of as her son.

A hint from Rohm leads her to his mother's home in Munich, then to Berlin.

Hannah is an extraordinary woman, injured and making her way around Germany while hiding from the authorities; torn between her need to find Anton and her need to chronicle the horrific conditions in the country that is no longer her home.

Rebecca Cantrell is an amazing writer. To read this book is to be Hannah (an experience that is heightened because it's written from her point of view); to see, feel and almost smell what she does.

Set aside a large block of time to read A Night of Long Knives, as you will not want to put it down once begun.