Book Review -- The Bleiberg Project by David Khara

The Bleiberg Project: A Consortium Thriller by David S. Khara
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thanks to Net Galley, the publishers Le French Book and the author David Khara to have provided me with this free edition of the book in exchange for an unbiased and an honest review.

This book is the first of a series about something called as The Consortium and another one of those gems which has been translated from French to make its debut in the English market. With the sheer number of languages spoken and being printed in the world, what we may be missing boggles the mind. But then that is a story for another day as they say…

The novel opens in 1942 Poland with an SS soldier reminiscing of about a Germany free from Hitler's paranoia and ambition all the while awaiting the arrival of Heinrich Himmler himself to the camp that he is guarding. All his reminiscing is for nothing as he is soon dead… an official victim of an assassination attempt against Himmler.

Fast forward to the present day, we are presented with Jeremy Corbain or Jay Novachek as he calls himself a high flying, self pitying Wall Street broker who is greeted with the news that his estranged father is dead. Suddenly thrust into a shadowy world where he no longer knows the good from the bad, Jeremy seeks to make sense of what's happening around him.

The Bleiberg Project takes to the times of writers like Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy who could spin a mean conspiracy thriller of shadowy organizations, secret cabals. The Bleiberg project gives us a shadowy group going by the name of Consortium which wants to redesign the world in its shape. The storyline moves back and forth in the past and present and is tied together effectively with various POVs from the main characters in the stories - Jeremy, his father, Eytan Morg.. The pace is frentic and the story holds your interest in the premise that is monstrous to consider but somehow looks implementable given the state that the world is in right now - genetic mutation on humans.

The quintessential Nazi quest for the perfect Übermensch and the Consortiums quest for creating a new World finds perfect partners in each other and years on clinical trials on humans give them a perfect specimen a child - number 302. When the child escapes from the its captors and with fall of the Reich, the Consortiums returns to the background continuing with its research and pulling the strings from behind.

The novel has its moments of humor with the interaction between the various characters and the dialogues which are alternatively funny, cynical and sarcastic in turns. All kudos to the translator for retaining the humor and the integrity of the dialogs in the process of translation.

A solid 4.5 stars. I would love to read the follow to this ASAP. Ohh… Wait I do have the follow up novel courtesy Net Galley. Well I must get started...