'THE WIND CHILL FACTOR'......HEIL, HEIL, THE GANG'S ALL HERE......

The Wind Chill Factor by Thomas Gifford (1975)   After having devoured the early Robert Ludlum novels, (back when dinosaurs ruled the earth), the young BQ pounced on novels like this one........expansive global thrillers dealing with the vast conspiracy of a rising Fourth Reich.....

            Oh yeah, baby......the Nazis were back, bigger, badder and more murderous than ever.

            And we couldn't get our hands on these books fast enough, staying up all night to finish 'em.

             After re-reading this one, it holds up as one of our favorites even more. That's probably because 43 years later, we're more appreciative of the family melancholy and tragedy that hangs over the story, deepening its violent thrills.

              Nazi-ism hovers like a perpetual dark cloud over alcoholic, recently divorced John Cooper and his family, forever stained by his wealthy, industrialist grandfather, who notoriously befriended Adolf Hitler and other Third Reich gangsters.

              When Cooper's called back to the family's Minnesota homestead, beckoned mysteriously by his brother, he's immediately plunged into an an all out assault by Neo-Nazi agents. The Fourth Reich goons wage war on Cooper's snowbound little town as if they're storming through Europe all over again.....with murders, firefights and bombs.

              Somehow surviving this dead-of-winter Britzkrieg, Cooper and the oddball town sheriff both end up in Europe, joining forces to track down and confront the revitalized Nazi plotters.....

               For Cooper, the hunt becomes intensely poignant and personal........after discovering that his late little sister Lee, long believed dead under the rubble of the  London blitz, may be alive and well and all grown up.......and married to the head Neo Nazi.  Yikes.

              Author Gifford unleashes many surprises along the way, as you'd expect in this kind of thriller..........but nothing compares to the monstrously overwhelming twist he saves for the final chapters, an evil, profoundly depressing turn of events worthy of Richard Condon's "Marchurian Candidate."

              Far fetched? Outrageous?  Maybe in 1975.......but in this day and age, it's far easier to swallow the premise of "The Wind Chill Factor" than ever before.

               And that's why we're giving it 4 bone-chillin' stars (****).  BQ recommends you cuddle up with this one to warm up these remaining winter nights......prepare to stay up late.....