The Information Officer [Audiobook] [Englisch] [MP3 CD]

(3.5 stars) Major Max Chadwick is the Information Officer for the British army on Malta during World War II. "Loyal Little Malta," a British colony strategically located between Sicily and North Africa, has been bombarded non-stop by the Germans and Italians for many months. Though British submarines based on Malta have been interrupting German shipping in the Mediterranean since the war began, the British are almost helpless against the Axis air power. In April, 1941, "the Luftwaffe flew a staggering 9600 sorties against the island, almost double the number for March, which itself had shattered all previous records." Virtually all the defending Spitfires and Hurricanes have been destroyed, and the total number of aircraft available to protect Malta, at this point, is a mere ten.

While Max tries to keep up the wartime morale of the island with his posts, the raids continue, but so does the social life for the British, and when Carmela Cassari, a "sherry queen" from the Blue Parrot turns up dead, Max's best friend, Dr. Freddie Lambert, secretly brings Max to the mortuary to see her suspicious wounds-and a torn shoulder tab from a British uniform. Two other sherry queens have also died recently, and Max and Freddie conclude that a serial killer is on the loose, and that this killer is a British officer.

With the never-ending air raids, the growing number of civilian deaths, and morale getting low, Max is not sure how to deal with the three murders, which so far have not been connected in the public mind to a serial killer. Knowing that his reports to his superiors will be ignored, he decides to investigate on his own, using some of his own contacts for information. Who to trust is a problem, however, since someone on the island with high-level knowledge (perhaps a British officer) is funneling strategic information to the Germans.

Author Mark Mills creates an atmospheric and ambitious novel of Malta, which, during World War II, was "the most bombed place on earth," and he attempts a wide scope in less than three hundred pages. Unfortunately, this allows him little opportunity for full development of any of his plot lines. It not a war novel in the traditional sense, as the strategizing and maneuvering which one sees in most war novels are not significant here. How the Maltese kept themselves going would have been a vibrant topic for discussion and illustration in this novel, but nearly all the important characters here are British (with one American), the Maltese remaining on the periphery. A section which appears at the end of each chapter takes us into the mind of the killer of the sherry queens, suggesting a psychological emphasis, but the killer's personality does not jell, and the discovery of the killer comes as a surprise.

Still, for those interested in reading an unusual novel about "this little lump of rock in the middle of the Mediterranean" and its amazing survival during the horrors of World War II, this novel opens up many avenues for further exploration. The references to real places and events are numerous (and fun to look up on Google) and a sense of what the island looks like shines through. Though the novel has its weaknesses, it still made me want to know more about the island, and the easy internet research satisfied my curiosity. Mary Whipple

The Information Officer isn't exactly a period piece; it's not exactly an espionage thriller, or a murder mystery or a war romance or a detective story. It's a little bit of all of these. And herein lies the problem; to this reader, the book succeeds most as a period piece.

The book is set in 1942 in Malta, where regular bombing campaigns and the strangling of supply lines conducted by the Germans threaten to bring this proud country to its knees. A band of English soldiers are called upon to aid the local Maltese. The key protagonist, Max Chadwick, is an information officer whose job is to bolster the morale of both the Maltese islanders and British troops; in essence, he's an officer of propaganda. All is going reasonably well until a girl is found murdered with a rag torn from a soldier's uniform in her hand. Max must do everything in his power to not disrupt the tenuous accord between the British and the locals.

The Information Officer works best as an expertly researched period; a look into bygone times when the Maltese stood bloody and unbowed against the German Lutwaffe. It is less successful as a thinly-plotted cloak-and-daggers mystery.

The narrative tends to be way too stilted - almost like an imitation of a film noir - with too many characters flitting in and out. For example, at the beginning of the book, we're introduced to the young officer Pemberton, who is set to work for Max Chadwick. We get all sorts of detail about him and then - nothing. He reappears briefly and then disappears forever. Other characters are introduced with lengthy four or five page back histories, only to play minor supporting roles. Detail is great, but in this case, it doesn't contribute to the arc of the story; it subtracts from it. The flashbacks further remove the reader from the building plot crescendo.

In the end, the novel just fails to engage and becomes a somewhat trudging read. This might have been an adrenalin-racing thriller about a serial killer preying on barmaids during a claustrophobic time (Eric Larsen accomplishes this kind of feat well in Devil and the White City). Instead, it seems more like an accurately written historical piece with a murder tagged on in an unmemorable way - sort of a mystery-by-the-numbers. Granted, I do not normally read crime fiction, but the excitement, alas, was not there for me.

I loved Amagansett and so looked forward with much anticipation to The Information Officer. Alas, the book is so mannered, so filled with dreary background details, that the novel is all but unreadable. It is stiff and turgid. There is such a lack of narrative pacing, such a lack of compelling characters that it's simply painful trudging through the prose. To say I am disappointed truly doesn't begin to cover my bemusement. I just don't understand how the gifted writer who created Amagansett could have lost his way so badly with The Information Officer.