Code Name: Orion's Eye

Author's Summary

Information provided by the author. 1943 World War II is raging. OSS officer Major Amos Mead tracks the elusive Nazi spy, Otto Hauptmann. Nazi Germany must steal the new radar technology. Mead must prevent it. From London and Berlin the race begins, finally converging in the South Pacific on the high seas where the lives of thirteen hundred men hang in the balance.

MWSA Review

Author Tom Gauthier has woven together a compelling story—mixing historical fact with fiction in “Code Name: Orion’s Eye.”  The result is a riveting tale of military intrigue and espionage from World War II, involving the Nazis’ desperate attempt to steal American radar technology.

The fast-paced action takes place throughout the world.  In Germany, competing factions struggle for supremacy of the Nazi intelligence services—one led by Field Marshal Goering and the other by the notorious SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler.  In England and the USA, members of the Allied intelligence community struggle with an ever-increasing sense of urgency to interpret jumbled and disparate tidbits of information in a desperate attempt to stay ahead of their adversaries and to protect this vital new technology from being acquired by the enemy.

Gauthier puts all this together—artfully merging historical facts, people and events with fictional details—to create a believable and suspense-filled yarn.  After a pulse-pounding chase through North and South America, the plot unwinds toward a showdown between an ad hoc group of allies and their shadowy German adversaries on board the USS San Juan in the faraway South Pacific.

As a bonus, the reader is treated to a recap of real people, places, and events at the end of the book to show how the author pieced together facts, suppositions and hypotheses in crafting his novel.

Reviewed by: John Cathcart (2012)