About the Author
Alan Jones is a Scottish author with three gritty crime stories to his name, the first two set in Glasgow, the third one based in London. He has now switched genres, and his WW2 trilogy will be published in August 2021. It is a Holocaust story set in Northern Germany. He is married with four grown up children and four wonderful grandchildren.
He has recently retired as a mixed-practice vet in a small Scottish coastal town in Ayrshire and is one of the RNLI volunteer coxswains on the local lifeboat. He makes furniture in his spare time, and maintains and sails a 45-year-old yacht in the Irish Sea and on the beautiful west coast of Scotland. He loves reading, watching films and cooking. He still plays football despite being just the wrong side of sixty.
His crime novels are not for the faint-hearted, with some strong language, violence, and various degrees of sexual content. The first two books also contain a fair smattering of Glasgow slang.
He is one of the few self-published authors to be given a panel at Bloody Scotland and has done two pop-up book launches at the festival in Stirling. He has spent the last five years researching and writing the Sturmtaucher Trilogy. Follow @alanjonesbooks on Twitter, Visit alanjonesbooks.co.uk
About the book
Book 1 in the Sturmtaucher Trilogy: a powerful and compelling story of two families torn apart by evil.
‘Kiel, Northern Germany, 1933. A naval city, the base for the German Baltic fleet, and the centre for German sailing, the venue for the upcoming Olympic regatta in 1936.
The Kästners, a prominent Military family, are part of the fabric of the city, and its social, naval and yachting circles. The Nussbaums are the second generation of their family to be in service with the Kästners as domestic staff, but the two households have a closer bond than most.
As Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party claw their way to power in 1933, life has never looked better for families like the Kästners. There is only one problem. The Nussbaums are Jews.
The Sturmtaucher Trilogy documents the devastating effect on both families of the Nazis’ hateful ideology and the insidious erosion of the rights of Germany's Jews. When Germany descends ever deeper into dictatorship, General Erich Kästner tries desperately to protect his employees, and to spirit them to safety.
As the country tears itself apart, the darkness which envelops a nation threatens not only to destroy two families, but to plunge an entire continent into war.’
Review
There is nothing that unusual about the way the Nussbaum and Kaestner family live, work and interact with each other. A German Jewish family and what would have been known as a pure Aryan German family. In the 1930s the hatred, discrimination and the political encroachment of the Nazi's was well underway.
Aside from showing the cracks that appear in the once united families, the author also does an excellent job of showing the way the military and the lurking dictatorship bat heads to then be consumed by the illogical and insidious ideology. On top of that the military strategy used to take one European country after the other flows quietly throughout the story.
It's an ambitious start to this historical fiction trilogy, which is certainly an in-depth study of fact combined with a enough fiction to fill in the blanks and create a fascinating read. Jones has clearly spent a lot of time researching the historical aspects of this period in German history and the maps, references and added information enhance the read.
I think it could have been shorter, however I embrace both the magnum opus aspect of the trilogy, and the fact the author wants to give due diligence to all the details surrounding the tragedy of the Holocaust, World War 2 and indeed 20th century history. Instead of concentrating on Ground Zero he draws the connections, consequences and cause and effect leading up to it, whilst keeping the read on a personal level by telling the story of a family directly impacted by all of the aforementioned.
Buy The Gathering Storm at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher : Ailsa Publishing pub date 19 Aug. 2021. Buy at Amazon com.
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