I enjoy a good WWII thriller. I grew up on Alistair MacLean gems like The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. One of my favorite novels in this genre is Jack Higgins The Eagle Has Landed, the classic story of a Nazi attempt to kidnap British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.In Sheba, Higgins returns to the WWII thriller in this story about a Nazi attempt to destroy Britain's life line to its eastern colonies, the Suez Canal, on the first day of the war. To do so, they use a German archeologist's secret discovery of the legendary Temple of Sheba in the Arabian Empty Quarter as a clandestine staging area for an airborne attack on the canal scheduled to coincide with the German invasion of Poland. Gavin Kane is a disillusioned American archeologist who now makes his living taking odd jobs, including smuggling. Kane is hired by an English heiress to find her husband, a British archeologist who went missing in his own for Sheba's temple. By tracing the man's last known movements, Kane, his employer, and the woman Kane loves, find the Temple of Sheba, and stumble onto the Nazi plot. While cover blurb emphasizes the Nazi attack, the Nazi plot is actually disrupted relatively early in the novel. After that, the book becomes a story of survival and revenge.Sheba mixes elements of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines with a 1950-ish adventure story. While Sheba doesn't have the depth of Eagle, or a memorable character the likable IRA gunman Liam Devlin, it is an enjoyable read.
