Tides of War by Douglas Muir



OK thriller with a feature that irritated me to no end...

A short summary:

 Set on the eve of the D-day invasion, the book features American Lt. Skeet Merrill and his ultra-lovely female spy partner, a Norwegian named Sigi Peterson. Their goal is to disrupt the German U-boats that are massing at a French shipyard in order to deploy against the Allied armada about to launch the invasion at Normandy.
The book is full of intrigue all around - is the U-Boat captain truly a loyal German? What are Sigi's secret orders? Which members of the French Resistance can be trusted? Who will Sigi sleep with next?

 My review:

 It is a tolerable thriller with a very irritating feature about the writing - how the author treats a Dutch member of the French Resistance, Erika Vermeer. Erika is a lesbian - a fact that we are never allowed to forget since the author constantly refers to her as "the lesbian" (as in, "the lesbian crossed the room" and "the lesbian sat quietly and drank the coffee"), rather than using the pronoun "she". This irritates me as much as referring to a black character as "the black man" or "the negro," rather than using his name or "he". Muir didn't refer to the heterosexual characters by their sexual preferences, so why continually do it with Erika Vermeer? Were we going to forget that the cross-dressing masculine female character that starred in a cross-dressing revue in Paris was a lesbian?

 I rated this book 3 stars out of 5 stars.

 This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Tides of War.

 Reviewed on July 1, 2004.

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