Mr Portobello Book Blog takes over today with his review of The Counterfeit Candidate by Brian Klein. How much involvement do you have with planning the road trips, and what road trip would you love to send the team on?

He has directed two feature-length films for BBC Worldwide and five entertainment specials for Netflix. Robert Ludlum did it best with "The Holcroft Covenant", as has Robert Harris in his masterpiece "Fatherland". Detective Chief Inspector Nicolas Vargas of the Buenos Aries Police Department sets out to solve the bank heist that had taken place in Buenos Aires. Hitler progeny later creating murder and havoc in pursuit of incriminating evidence that has more recently been stolen inadvertently by a gang of bankrobbers. TV director Brian Klein tells us why the Covid lockdown is to thank for his new novel, The Counterfeit Candidate, seeing the light of day, why all those years of reading thrillers has finally paid off, and gives us an exclusive sneak peek into the sequel.That was a key moment as it inspired me to begin the writing process and for the following 12 weeks I worked 10 hours a day, seven days a week and became totally obsessed with the project. Klein spins an unlikely narrative wherein Hitler, Eva Braun and Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann flee across the Atlantic to Argentina under false identities after simulating their deaths. I think overall it is a decent read which will keep you going through the night as you wonder if Franklin's team will get to the right robber's hiding place or whether the police will. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Faced with an empty calendar for the first time in his career, he got cracking on a story he’d first conceived some 40 years before.

This led me to think about the ‘What If …’ scenario where Hitler had fled with his wife, Eva Braun, to Argentina and they had settled down in Patagonia to start a family. Bormann, Braun, Eichmann, Hitler- they all feel cardboard characters, like the author just couldn't make them as real (and loathsome) as possible. Everything feel rushed, like the author couldn't take the time to bother to actually build tension, describe places and actions. The characters are accessible and some are easy to like and some not so, but you bring them on your journey from the heist to the end, or is that just the beginning? Firstly, and most importantly, I think you need a great story—a narrative that will constantly keep the reader guessing as to what comes next.The idea of keeping Adolf Hitler and his lineage at the core of a Bank heist and murder mystery is simply brilliant. Despite the sixty-seven-year interval and a span of thirteen thousand miles, these events are indelibly linked. With echoes of The Boys From Brazil, The Odessa File and the Marathon Man it takes us on a flight of imagination about prominent ex Nazis casting their evil spells under assumed post war identities and this one goes further than even those in as this prominent ex Nazi is the most prominent of them all. Senator John Franklin is set to become the next President of the United States and his father's deposit box is one of the ones in which the contents were stolen.