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A review by ioanastoica
The Holcroft Covenant by Robert Ludlum
1.0
The writing is horrible! (ever other sentence ends with an exclamation point!) The story is preposterous! And the magnitude of the conspiracy is entirely unbelievable! The characters are detestable! (Noel, the protagonist, is so dumb, naive, and ridiculously gullible that it's impossible to root for him).
The short of it: Nazis steal a large amount of $$ from the Third Reich as it is about to fall in order to start the Fourth Reich 30 years later. The protagonist is brought in and told he is instrumental to the release of this money - to victims. But he must be silent because if the authorities find out, the money will come under litigation. It does not even occur to the wonderful hero that perhaps this is best: for the money to come under litigation and for those who have a claim on it to exercise this claim. No...., it is much more "heroic" and "just" for HIM to decide how to distribute the money himself to the victims (obviously this is not the purpose of the money but from the first, "Noel" shows himself to be entirely without any mental capacity).
Awful. And the ways in which Ludlum tries to complicate the plot is just absolutely gratuitous. There's incest and beautiful women with large breasts, there's the ODESSA and the Rache, a kibbutz in Israel, and, really, the Fourth Riech is about to take over the world and NO ONE has any inkling of this?
The short of it: Nazis steal a large amount of $$ from the Third Reich as it is about to fall in order to start the Fourth Reich 30 years later. The protagonist is brought in and told he is instrumental to the release of this money - to victims. But he must be silent because if the authorities find out, the money will come under litigation. It does not even occur to the wonderful hero that perhaps this is best: for the money to come under litigation and for those who have a claim on it to exercise this claim. No...., it is much more "heroic" and "just" for HIM to decide how to distribute the money himself to the victims (obviously this is not the purpose of the money but from the first, "Noel" shows himself to be entirely without any mental capacity).
Awful. And the ways in which Ludlum tries to complicate the plot is just absolutely gratuitous. There's incest and beautiful women with large breasts, there's the ODESSA and the Rache, a kibbutz in Israel, and, really, the Fourth Riech is about to take over the world and NO ONE has any inkling of this?