Customer Reviews

The Information Officer: A Novel

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(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.

Even after finishing this book, I was not sure what this book was. Was it a mystery? Romance? Historical novel? It seemed to try to be all three, but missed on all fronts.

Set on Malta in 1942 during the Germans' tremendous assault (the small island was the most bombed area in history), it follows the life of the British Information Officer. He has an affair going with a married wife of an officer, is falling in love with another woman (romance); is trying to spue propaganda while the devastation and raids are described page after page (historical; and,trying to figure who raped and killed young women (mystery).

The pace is very slow due to constant flashbacks. Not a character can be introduced or a building mentioned without several paragraphs or a few pages giving a history that does not add to the book in any way. At page 150, I felt as if the book was still being introduced.

Deep in the background is the mystery. Women are being raped and murdered. Max, the Information officer is let in on this by his friend the surgeon. He does nothing with the information except worry about it. He mentions it to a woman and word gets back to the authorites who call him off. Then, more of nothing happens on the mystery - except mentioning that he's worried about it - until the end. The last thirty or so pages are devoted to "solving" it. Max seems to divine the answer of who committed the crime through an unexplained epiphany. Turns out, as we learn in the epilogue, that he got it wrong anyway.

The plodding plot is very predictable. Perhaps it is summed up in one scene. After his epiphany, Max goes rocketing through the island during a bombing raid. He runs into a string of bombs and gets thrown. When he wakes from his unconscious state, he has something leaning on him. You know it is the formally unreliable motorcycle just as you know that the wreck of a bike is going to start right up after being thrown through the air several feet.

I did not know about the siege of Malta before reading this book. It obviously was horrible; but the reader can not get empathy through the cardboard cutout characters. They seem to be from central casting of a "B" WWII movie from the fifties. There is the party-throwing socialite wife of the commanding officer; the robust commander, mysterious American, angelic doctor, danger-be-damned pilot, lovesick wife, modest main character. None have any depth.

If you want good war-time books, pick last year's "German Wife" or "Guernica". Unfortunately, I can find no reason to recommend this book.

In this cinematic war-time novel Mills combines the elements of espionage with a love story in a setting that is evocative as it is beautiful. Central to the Information Officer's machinations is the young and handsome Major Max Chadwick, assigned to the Mediterranean island of Malta as the axis powers perpetually strafe the island, intent to wipe out every aspect of the Allied presence. Working in the Information Office and disseminating information to the locals to embolden their resolve, Max offers up for public consumption a cocktail of cold, factual and apparently unbiased news. Along with the monitoring of enemy radio stations in the Mediterranean, this the kind of work best done in the shadows of government. But Max's position and his very existence on the island is threatened when a serial killer is found to be murdering "sherry queens" dance hostesses who work the bars and bawdy music halls that infested the lower ends of Valetta, a disreputable quarter dubbed the Gut.

Max is even more disturbed when he's Called the mortuary, the body of a woman found in the street, the girl young and innocent beauty that the cold pallor of death can't erase. There's a raw and ragged gash ran from beneath her right ear toward her collar bone . She's not just an unlucky victim of the war, but a man who had violated and killed them. The only evidence a his pocket a torn shoulder tab Freddie ;had recovered from the clenched girl's fist. It is these heinous crime that thrusts Mill's complex spunky protagonist into his role as a defender of innocent victims, war-time Malta rife murder and mayhem with opportunities for espionage made all too real.

The victims have carefully selected from the lower reaches of society, their deaths tainted with just enough ambiguity to arouse suspicion and get Maltese tongues wagging. But Mark is frustrated by Malta Command who simply suppress the matter, quite content it summed for local girls to keep on dying. The result is an unsavory hodgepodge of imagination run wild, exacerbated by the journalist's inflamed rhetoric and the loss of common sense in favor of public panic and rage against an unknown threat. Max is sure a monster is on the loose who will stop at nothing to protect his identity, but his investigations produce random associations that won't hold up in court is not the point.

Meanwhile, Max's British colleagues revel in their little get-togethers, especially his commander, the self important Captain Pendleton, his ex-pat friends Rosemund and Hugh, a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Artillery, and his colleagues Freddie and Elliott, the tall American. But it's the handsome, hopeless Max who is torn between two such different women: Mitzi, a Maltese girl of mixed ancestry a brings a blanket over his confused feelings and also Lillian with her tales of dead girls and cover-ups deaf to the dictates of his weary body, thoughts of Lillian and Mitzi swirling endlessly, aimlessly around and around in his head, overlapping intertwining. As Malta is decimated finding solace in the warmth of her body. Brief and breathless, Mitzi shows no signs of guilt over her betrayal of her husband Lionel, just a hunger and urgency in the arms of Max. Max is a solemn soul at the best of times. The seed of fear germinates in his chest when Lillian goes missing, suggesting something far more sinister. Max is blind to Lillian's feelings but to his own too, and he makes a terrible mistake one that will plague him for the rest of his life.

Mill's prose is as grand and as cinematic as the trials of his intrepid hero, Malta is brought vividly to life. laced with a old fashioned cinematic grandeur, a biblical landscape, sun-bleached, shade-less harsh to the eye. The town and villages scattered like dice on a table top, Valetta and her twin harbors, lay a seemingly endless expanse of viridian-green water as Max walks the streets searching for answers, pummeled by the bombing runs, the splatter of shell bursts smudging the sky, the arcing lines of tracer fire from the Bofers joining the fray. This is a world filled with desperation, sorrow, hope and forgiveness where human drama is summoned with bold strokes. Exhaustion is blunted by fear, the Maltese exhibiting a kind of resigned apathy, a weary fatalism against the whistle and shriek of falling bombs, the thump and crump of explosions, the staccato bark of the Bofors. Meanwhile, the truth is fed to them to shore up their morale, Max and his friends caught up against a bureaucratic behemoth, that has ruled their lives, feeding off the downpour of bombs. From the trials of war to the machinery of administration, Max doesn't number himself among them, insulted, intimidated, threatened with court-martial, even blackmailed, Max survives to fight another day. The true identity of the killer is shrouded in mystery, puppet master surveying them all from on high, constantly pulling their strings and jerking their limbs, a surprising and unexpected enemy. Mike Leonard March 2010.

On the island of Malta in the middle of World War II, maintaining morale is a key job and Max Chadwick, the information officer of the title, does it well, spinning tales of a man knocking an Italian plane out of the sky with only his rifle into rip-roaring propaganda. But then there's the ugly underside of the job -- what is Max to do about the possibility that a member of the British occupying forces, a naval officer, may be murdering local bar girls?

Certainly, with the island under daily (and nightly) bombardment by the Germans and the Italians, it's hard for the powers that be to care about a few more dead girls. But Max is not only angered by that indifference, but worried that if the Maltese discover what is going on -- if they find the clue that one of Max's friends brings to him, signaling that these are murders and that the culprit is a British officer -- all his propaganda efforts will be in vain.

After the opening 40 pages or so, which drag on, I couldn't put this book down. It turned into one of those compulsive "must read" books, and when I had to put it aside to sleep, it even haunted my dreams. This is a fascinating and gripping yarn by a writer who manages to effortlessly blend details of the murderer's inner thoughts with Max's quest to bring him to justice and the attacks on Malta. (The climactic scene takes place against the backdrop of a massive raid and the arrival of critical deliveries of war materiel.) It's a standard serial killer thriller, but also a spy novel; a buddy novel, but also a romance, and I found the author did a convincing job welding all those disparate elements into a single suspenseful narrative. The drama builds right through to the final pages, although the device of framing that narrative within one set in 1951 leaves one or two loose ends and sometimes feels as if it doesn't need to be there. It could have worked as an epilogue only, not a preface and an epilogue. If you're looking for a "thumping good read", however, it's worth pushing past that initially slow section until you get caught up in the action. I'd be surprised if that didn't happen...

This isn't quite up to the high standard set by Phillip Kerr in his noir novels featuring Bernie Gunther, but it's just as good as some of the spy novels written by the likes of Dan Fesperman; I'd certainly recommend it to fans of either writer.

Imagine sitting in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea on an island the size of a postage stamp with armies at war sitting on every adjoining shore watching what goes on. Imagine being the last Allied territory east of Gilbraltor in the second year of World War II. That was the situation for the people living on Malta in 1943. Submarine traffic was so heavy that supplies and armaments ships had trouble getting through successful. A delivery of forty fighter planes were bombed into smithereens within 24 hours of being delivered. Still the Maltese inhabitants and the British armed service people, on the island held on. Bombings were almost continuous morning, noon and night. Still the people, of both communities, stood strong. As an American "diplomat" says to the lead character, Max, only the British could experience a disaster like Dunkirk and call it a victory.

Into this community comes a psychopathic killer. Young women are being murdered. At least three are found dead before someone realizes that these fatalities are the result of a killer and not casualties of the bombings. Max Chadwick, The Information Officer of the title is assigned the task of finding the killer before the Maltese realize that their daughters are being murdered, perhaps by a British Officer, and turn against the British in their fight to keep the island from the Nazis.

As Max moves through the phases of his search, we meet the motley collection of Administrative and Military people who make up the British contingent. Max's search also takes us into the homes and community of the Maltese natives. Malta is an island which has been attacked and taken many times over the centuries, and its people know how to watch which way the wind blows to pick the winner and keep their families as safe as possible. Rumors are starting and Max needs to move fast.

Mark Mills spins this tale in the same way that he wrote "The Savage Garden" and "Amagansett". He gives us an intriguing mystery and builds a picture of the place where it is happening. The ending is tricky. I was completely surprised, and I am quite good at solving these mysteries before the last page. One question that Mills brings up is whether the perpetrator is actually a brutal, unemotional killer or is he or she a fifth columnist sent to disrupt the comfortable relationship between the British and the Maltese which is keeping the island free. Or, is the killer both.

This is a wonderful read and I highly recommend it. Good reading.

In "The Information Officer" by Mark Mills the setting is the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta in 1942 at the height of World War II. It was a British crown colony that was bombed with more explosive tonnage than London itself. The Germans and the Italians were keen to destroy its military capability, lying as it is strategically between Sicily and North Africa. The Maltese were a courageous people standing by the British who were protecting them but also furthering their own war interests by making the island a bastion.
Major Max Chadwick is the military's information officer who gets some news that may be potentially devastating to the British. He learns that a British officer is a serial killer who has murdered at least three Maltese women. If this became general knowledge among the Maltese, they could lose faith in their British occupiers. A truism quoted is "A lie can makes its way halfway round the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on."
One of the murdered girls is found with a shoulder tab insignia from an officer on the submarine Upstanding, and this turns out to be a valuable clue. Max's torrid love affair with Mitzi who is married to the sub's captain is an important plot element.
The picture that Mills paints of the air attacks against the island is brilliantly done. The descriptions of the air raids, the pluck and courage of the Spitfire pilots and the general atmosphere of a place under relentless siege - these are all depicted with great skill. What may disappoint readers is the conclusion of the book when melodrama takes hold and the author's explanations and denouement are off-the-wall and incredulous. I shook my head when I got to the end.
Mills uses alternating chapters in which the killer writes at great length in a journal. I became confused as various characters came on the scene, and the book's plot became less convincing and more complex.
The author knows Malta and is not only able to recreate the wartime horrors of the little island but also to convey its charm. Unfortunately Mills belongs to the plotting school where more plot and murkier plot strands are better than fewer ones.

This should have been a lot better than it was. I'm an Alan Furst fan and had thought this was right up my alley, but the plotting and dialogue to me felt amateurish. All I can say for it is that it showed me the isle of Malta during the second world war.

I see a lot of people are complaining this book doesn't neatly fit into one particular genre. I say so what? I like Mark Mills' historical mysteries, and the background of war adds excitement to a story. One of my favorite things about his books is that he can take you there, even if it's a time and place neither you nor he have actually been. That's good research. I like fiction (and especially mysteries) that give you a chance to learn about a new place and a new subject. I didn't know much more about Malta than the Maltese Falcon. I didn't even know it was IN the war. So the air raids and the tactics of moving ships and troops and the espionage were entirely knew to me, I thought it was great that he had chapters from the viewpoint of the sinister serial killer, giving the reader the sense of being stalked by him. I came away with so much more than when I started the book. Unlike some others, I can recommend it highly. You'll be standing in a Maltese street hearing the sirens go off, wondering if life will ever be normal again.