The Quisling Factor
Oakley returns to the fjords of Norway, and her protagonist, Jens, in her new postwar thriller. Tore Haugland, a Norwegian ex-intelligence officer, Codename Jens, is recovering from his capture by Henry Rinnan, an infamous collaborator, recruited by the Nazis in 1940. After infiltrating Jens’ Fjellstad resistance fighters, who posed as fishermen but ran messages for the Shetland Bus, Rinnan hauled Jens off to a blood-soaked basement room called The Cloister, tortured him, and left him for dead.
Recovering from his brutal injuries with his wife’s family in America in April 1946, Jens must soon return to Norway to face his torturer at the Trondheim war crimes trial. Threatening notes imply that neither he nor his family are safe from past dangers. What follows is a roller coaster thrill ride from Oslo to Fjellstad to Trondheim. The writing is tight and sparing as history unfolds alongside the present. Oakley’s expertise and knowledge of her subject shine through her work, and we are caught up with the characters, feeling the fear, the trepidation and the hard choices. The war is over, but it’s never really over. Who can Jens trust when, back in Fjellstad, he finds there is still fear, resentment and a hunger for vengeance?
Although a sequel to The Jøssing Affair, this novel stands completely alone, and the backstory is very cleverly woven in. The gruesome atrocities committed are handled with respect, and although extremely graphic in places, there is no gratuitous dwelling on gore. The cast of characters is very extensive, and Oakley has provided a ‘who’s who’, but I did not have to refer to it once, due to her descriptive skill of time and place.
This is a lesser-known subject―the five-year Nazi occupation of Norway―but it is the best wartime thriller I have read in a while! Recommended to readers of Robert Harris, David Gilman and Rory Clements.
