Hunt of the Kite

Jerry Coker

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Hunt of the Kite

Jerry Coker

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Hunt of the Kite

Theme:

Revenge, “revanche” is a basic tenet of the historical French character, with political, racial, religious and economic components boiling over during times of turmoil and strife — especially during war. Someone or some class of citizen, whether they are immigrants or long-term residents, will be the target of blame. Then inevitably the tide will change and those previously targeted will become hunters, and retribution will be the new order. During World War II the Jews suffered particularly hard. In France as all over Europe, a huge part of the pain suffered by Jews was directly attributable to people those Jews considered their friends and neighbors. There were few opportunities for revenge during the war, for the callous and cold-hearted identification of Jews resulted in deportation and eventual death. But it did happen. When the opportunity presented itself, there were those who did not hesitate and were more than capable.

Synopsis:

Anna Metzgen was a second-year medical student at the Sorbonne in the early spring of 1940. Like most French citizens, the war and the threat of war were background noise compared to the daily concerns of working or studying. They believed their leaders who said the Germans would stop at their borders. But the war came on and countries dropped like sliced wheat around them. By 1940 the ring was complete. Anna, her slim features reflecting her Northern Europe, Polish roots, had to face another side of her heritage. Only her Jewish friends were not so naïve to believe France would survive unscathed with what was coming. Anna’s father crossed the border into France 40 years earlier with his religion recorded as Juif — Jew. Anna is raised as a Catholic, so her father’s past meant little because he converted to Catholicism as soon as he immigrated. He changed his name and religion and had shed his past as easily as a snakeskin. Or so they thought. The journey to come for Anna is nothing she could have ever imagined. She leaves Paris in the dead of night believing she would be home in Provence in a few days. Her journey would take four years.

To protect herself and her identity, Anna finds security in the arms of the enemy and briefly, love. But this security has a price, as she discovers her lover is responsible for finding trains so that foreign and French Jews can be transported to Poland. The irony of their love affair is compelling and hopeless, as he is found out and forced to transfer. Left alone, Anna learns to survive in a lonely, invisible existence leading to destitution and eventual prostitution and murder. Anna survives because she adapts. She embraces her cloak of invisibility and grayness, living in a class of French worker who is unseen. Her grayness disappears when she encounters Vichy clients who only see a beautiful young French woman they can hold and possess for an hour or two. But they are known to her as once close family friends who chose to send her parents to their deaths. They don’t recognize Anna but she does them, knowing what they have done. There is no mercy in her heart.

Her retribution has a cost and Anna must disappear. She joins the Resistance only to discover no real common cause or uniformity among the groups, only opportunists and self-serving gangs competing for Allied funds and weapons. Disillusioned she is first recruited by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and later the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), with the carrot of being able to work in Southern France, closer to her surviving sister. Feeling used and manipulated by vast powers with little interest in her family concerns or the real future of France, Anna is inserted once again into France, days before the D-Day invasion with the specific purpose of assassinating a key German Army commander.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HUNT OF THE KITE:

A New Historical Novel by Jerry Coker
ISBN: 978-1-929763-87-0
300 pages / 6 x 9 inches / Softcover
$21.95 USA / $25.95 CAN.

$9.95 Amazon Kindle e-book

Hunt of the Kite is a new historical novel scheduled for release by Pocol Press, Punxsutawney, PA on May 1, 2019. Expect it to be available in print only at the Pocol Press website, PocolPress.com, for the initial few weeks. Later it will be available in electronic ebook and print at the Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites.