Honor Bound

Cletus Frade is a Marine pilot recovering from a crash landing at Guadalcanal when the OSS recruits him and sends him to Argentina under cover as an employee of Howell Petroleum — his American grandfather's oil company — with a second assignment underneath the first: reestablishing contact with the estranged father he has never met, one of the most powerful men in Argentina and the architect of a coming coup against its pro-German president.

The official mission is to sink the Reine de la Mer, a German supply ship disguised as a neutral freighter, and Frade's team pulls it off with a low-tech trick: incendiaries dropped from Frade's own plane to light the ship up at night for a submarine waiting offshore. Along the way the book gives him an unlikely ally in Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, a young Luftwaffe pilot and baron whose own father is part of the German resistance, and the investigation surfaces something uglier than the sea mission — Nazi officials ransoming Jewish concentration-camp prisoners back to their families for money.

It's a wartime thriller built on a genuinely under-covered theater — Argentina's Nazi sympathies and its use as a wartime bolt-hole — and it moves fast, at the cost of psychological depth; Frade and von Wachtstein's friendship across enemy lines resolves more smoothly than it probably would in life. It's for readers who want the mechanics of a WWII operation and don't need the moral weight to slow the plot down.