John Gardner knows that the Nazis still sell books but seems a bit uneasy about it—a dilemma he resolves by contriving to have it three ways at once. "The Werewolf Trace" … is simultaneously laden with detailed lore about the final days in Hitler's bunker, debunking of the excesses of an intelligence service obsessed with the eradication of nonexistent evil, and a ghost story as well. Even more astonishing, at least to the point where one turns the pages to see how on earth he is going to bring it all off, the book actually works.

"Werewolf" is the British code designation for a 9-year-old boy who may, or may not, have survived the last hours of the Third Reich and who just might be primed to become "Werewolf, the inheritor of the Reich, the next in line within the Nazi Apostolic succession." But even if that were true, which agent Vincent Cooling doubts, what conceivable damage could such a person—now a naturalized British citizen and furniture importer living a quiet suburban life with his wife and 3-year-old daughter—cause?…

Lacking Gardner's narrative facility, I am unable in this space to do more than add that the house in which the putative Führer lives is quite incidentally haunted by the ghosts of an earlier tragedy involving a child killed by a hawk, and is situated across the street from Cooling's mother's apartment as well. All of which enables our man to pose as a researcher into the "paranormal" and helps bring matters to a head. Gardner's prose style is an adequate vehicle for this sort of thing, no more, no less—just about right for a screen treatment, which in a sense is what this is. (p. 14)