This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Free Book Program, which is open to all readers and is completely free. The author will provide you with a free copy of their book in exchange for an honest review. You and the author will discuss what sites you will post your review to and what kind of copy of the book you would like to receive (eBook, PDF, Word, paperback, etc.). To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email.
Richard Carl Roth spent his career in the Marketing, Advertising and Package Design business. Formally residing in New Jersey he currently lives just outside Hilton Head in South Carolina.
He approached the writing of Endangered Eagle, his first novel, with the intention of combining some of the elements of a historical non-fiction text with a fictional story line. The story as written is woven around people who actually lived, and events that actually occurred in Berlin in 1936.
Studying the history of Germany, from the end of the Great War through World War II, for over thirty years, he has visited a wide variety of locations significant to the study of Hitler’s Third Reich including Berlin, Nuremberg, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, The Imperial War Museum in London and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.
He has been a collector of Third Reich Militaria and has an extensive personal reference library of over 450 books including memoirs, diaries, biographies and treatises by people who were current to the period, and the works of a great many recognized historians who have covered various aspects of the Third Reich and its major players.
This library is supplemented with maps, films and newsreels as well as German, American, British and Canadian magazines, newspapers and catalogs that were published during this period.
He has drawn on all of these resources to produce this meticulously researched Historical
Novel.
Reviewed by Marta Tandori for Readers' Favorite
Endangered Eagle: A Karl von Ernst Mystery is a compelling work of historical fiction by writer Richard Carl Roth, set during a well-documented period in history. Berlin, 1936. Hitler and the Nazis have already instituted a reign of terror throughout Germany, but with Berlin about to host the Olympics, the Nazis are anxious to show the world a “New Germany.” Adding to the heightened excitement of the impending Olympics, it has been arranged that Charles Lindbergh – the first man to fly from New York to Paris – will visit Berlin during the Olympics as a special guest. Weeks prior to his visit, General Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, is advised of an assassination plot against the American hero. He gives Karl von Ernst, a former Chief Inspector in the Berlin police, the formidable task of identifying the mastermind behind the assassination plot and preventing at all costs what might otherwise be a public relations disaster for Hitler’s Germany.
Many books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been written dealing with, or set in, Nazi Germany and much of it has focused on the Holocaust – those who perished in it or managed to survive it. What is refreshing to see in Endangered Eagle is that although the setting for the book is during a time when the Nazis were already in power, the story focuses on the Berlin Olympics and the assassination plot of Charles Lindbergh. Both are story-worthy in their own right, but combining the two and setting them against a backdrop of Nazi Germany in 1936 and you’ve got the makings of one great story. Roth’s work is meticulously researched and lovingly scribed. The author does a bang-up job conveying time and place and his prose, although somewhat stilted, works perfectly in conveying German decorum and heightened paranoia throughout Berlin, thanks to the fear the Nazis have evoked in everyone. In this respect, Endangered Eagle sets the stage beautifully. The events as they unfold are compelling, heightening the intrigue before Roth throws his readers an unexpected curve ball near the end – making for a bang-up finish. For lovers of historical fiction dealing with the Nazi era or simply those who love intrigue, Endangered Eagle delivers on all fronts and is worth the read.
