Spoils of Victory
In 1946, World War II is over, and Germany is occupied and governed by the American, French, Russian, and British military and police. Bavarian South Germany is the American Zone with an American military government. Mason Collins is an ex-cop and a crime investigator of the U.S. Military police in Garmisch, a pretty, un-bombed ski resort town at the Austrian border of Bavaria.
In this town, refugees, amnesiac Nazis, war-shocked civilians, humiliated German military and police, and opportunistic villains from everywhere, together with the occupying armies with their own problems and foibles, all form a social chaos where the tentacles of crime, sadism and murder slither freely. Treachery and suspicion are rampant.Mason Collins has to find a murderer.
Mason Collins’ friend – Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agent John Winston – has reason to suspect here in this town the existence of a vast criminal conspiracy led by men of power in the sundry commercial, police, military and criminal forces of Bavaria. He tells Mason of this, and then is slaughtered with his beautiful girlfriend. Mason goes on the hunt to dredge where he may for Winston’s evidence and villains. He must find and neuter the bad guys without upsetting the cozy ones.
John A. Connell has given him a complex route, and a pig-headed stubbornness to succeed. The characters are straightforward, the descriptions reasonably restrained, and the incidents well defined, logically interdependent, and complex without confusion. For action, tension, beautiful women, and all types of men, this coherent story satisfies.
