A Game for Heroes

Jack Higgins delivers a late-war Channel Islands thriller that works best when it leans into the setting and the action. Lt. Col. Owen Morgan infiltrates a fictional SS-held island in the war's dying days, contending with a jealous rival who has sabotaged the mission from the inside and an old love now entangled with a German submariner. The Paperback Warrior singled out the naval rescue sequences as some of Higgins' finest work — and they are vivid and tense. The caveat is that the central complication (the deliberate false intelligence) feels convenient rather than earned, and the romantic subplot competes for space with the military plot rather than deepening it. Solid mid-tier Higgins for WWII thriller fans; not his best, but not a disappointment either.