The Human Pool

An epic and hauntingly topical geopolitical thriller spanning six decades and three continents The Human Pool confirms the journalist and award-winning filmmaker Chris Petit as the heir to John le Carré and Robert Harris.<P><B>THE HUMAN POOL</B><P>Rumors about Willi Schmidt's actions during the Second World War were enigmatic to say the least. He worked for U.S. Intelligence out of Switzerland; he cut black-market deals on the side; he rescued scores of Jews from the Nazis. Saint or sinner? Either way Schmidt was strictly murky waters -- and reports of his death in 1945 surprised no one.<P>Sixty years later Joe Hoover is convinced Schmidt is still alive armed with a false name and a fortune in pharmaceuticals. For years Hoover former Intelligence courier for the American spymaster Allen Dulles has been haunted by misgivings about his own wartime role in his boss's top-secret financial partnership with the Third Reich. Now someone wants Hoover dead.<P>Back in Europe Hoover discovers that operations he thought had ended long ago are still being played out. Forming an uneasy alliance with Vaughan an undercover journalist investigating neo-Nazi traffic of Kurdish refugees he begins to unravel a conspiracy that leads deep into his past to his days mixing with Nazi officers in the supposedly neutral cities of Zurich Istanbul and Budapest where enemies did deals over cocktails.<P>At each step Hoover finds the shadow of Willi Schmidt and the specter of World War II's most grotesque and enduring legacy -- a trade in people: the human pool.<P>Set against a vivid historical backdrop <I>The Human Pool</I> mixes fiction and fact to explosive effect. Chris Petit has crafted his finest novel yet -- a cosmopolitan thinking-person's thriller that turns the world inside out and traces its veins: It spells nothing less than the rebirth of the great espionage novel.