Kate Rees, a young American markswoman, has been recruited by British intelligence to drop into Paris with a dangerous assignment: assassinate the Führer. Wrecked by grief after a Luftwaffe bombing killed her husband and infant daughter, she is armed with a rifle, a vendetta, and a fierce resolve.
Chances that you’ll be able to put Black’s thriller down once you’ve picked it up? Also slim to none ... This is one of those espionage thrillers for which the word 'taut' was invented ... Black’s standalone debut places her in that small but stellar company of top-notch suspense writers who have written World World II thrillers featuring female protagonists ... Black’s familiarity with the streets and routines of Paris gives that passage its aura of authenticity. But much more dazzling is the ingenuity with which Black keeps aloft the crucial question of this superior suspense tale: namely, how is Kate ever going to get out of Paris? ... gives readers who are stuck inside the nerve-racking but undeniably liberating image of a rogue female racing and dodging all over the streets of Paris.
Black knows a thing or two about frenetic dashes across the city’s neighborhoods, into and out of cafés, bars, and back alleys—after all, she’s been tracking Aimée’s peregrinations through 19 novels—but, harried as Aimée always is, she’s never had Nazis on her tail. Brilliantly building on the novel’s premise, Black constructs a surprise-filled plot, fueled by breathless pacing, Alan Furst–like atmosphere, and a textured look at Resistance fighters in Paris. There is even a tantalizing subplot involving the surprisingly sympathetic German policeman who is chasing Kate. Black stretches her wings here, soaring to new heights.
Ms. Black...excels at setting vivid scenes, creating lively characters and maintaining pulse-elevating suspense. Three Hours in Paris, with its timetable structure and its hunt for a covert operative, recalls such comparable works as Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal and Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle.
