Book Note: W.E.B. Griffin, The Double Agents

This is book 6 of the "Men at War" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

By W.E.B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV, and there's a photo of the two of them together on the back of the dust jacket. The copyright is only in the name of William E. Butterworth IV, strongly suggesting that he's taken over this series (this is an OSS book, the "Men at War" series); but that could just be a tax dodge.

The really major goof that leaps out at me is where Charity Hoche, driving in England in 1943, spends a couple of paragraphs dealing with converting distances on signs from kilometers to miles, and her odometer from miles to kilometers. Last I checked, signs in England still aren't in metric, more than 60 years later. I wasn't born in 1943, so I can't personally testify that they didn't maybe have metric signs then and convert back to miles later—but I don't believe it. She's driving an American car, hence the alleged problem, but there's no reference to the driver's seat being on the wrong side, either.

This one is slow and disjointed, and the major action seems to be going back to Palermo to find out if burning the nerve gas has caused major casualties (Canidy didn't know burning it in a ship fire wouldn't neutralize it; he was probably thinking of it as "ammunition" which, generally, blows up real good).

They do, in the end, find out. The stuff had been unloaded, and was loaded onto another ship and shipped back out. So they sank that ship, and a patrol boat. Ignoring all they said earlier about the dangers (they were at least out of the harbor, though, so maybe the expected the effect to dissipate before they reached people).