Their Last Secret by Carl Hansen

If you enjoy the discovery thriller genre and authors like Michael Crichton, there is every chance you are going to love this book, Their Last Secret, by Carl Hansen. I discovered the book and the author via the Goodreads book website. As I have written elsewhere, Goodreads is a great place to discover new books and authors. Many writers also network there. Carl volunteered to read my book, The Cougar, and give it an honest critique. I wanted to read Their Last Secret as it sounded fascinating.

The very first thing I discovered about Carl's book is that it is actually TWO books. For that reason I started with book 1 - Their Last Secret Declassified. Declassified is action from the word go, we learn of a secret so amazing that its consequences go right to the President himself. This secret is conveyed from Rommel to Field Marshall Keitel before Rommel's death. A Russian National learns of the secret from Keitel's secretary and liberates an African woman from a brothel in a concentration camp. Securing an audience with General Eisenhower enables the woman the Germans call Herta to find asylum in the USA.

Mistakes happen and key to the plot is the premature declassification of documents about Herta. The news is quickly stifled, but not before a psychopathic billionaire heiress sets a chain of escalating violent and dramatic events in motion. The novel ends with a mountain tragedy, the destruction of a family and a shoot out in a hospital that segues seamlessly into Book 2 - Discovered.

Their Last Secret Discovered builds the tension slowly. We learn more about Elise and her family. Carl characterizes the people beautifully and we also learn much more about Herta, who it turns out is m-Eve! We learn more about the past, we learn more about why m-Eve needs to remain hidden. Elise seeks to avenge her family and the events build into a slow crescendo with several unexpected turns along the way. The psychopath Mavra evades justice so many times, it seems, but eventually comes to an end that is very fitting considering the nature and the magnitude of her crimes.

The ending is a happy one that I will not reveal as I don't want to spoil it for you, suffice it to say that it brings several delicious and unexpected surprises. This is not a book I would have discovered but for Goodreads. I thoroughly enjoyed it and the pace suited my taste very well! I shall be reading it again.

If it were not for publicising my own novel, The Cougar, I would not have discovered Goodreads, or this great read from Carl Hansen. If you want to know more about my own book, The Cougar, check out this video I made. The music used is Fantasy for piano - my own composition.

I made this video to showcase my own book, The Cougar. This is a story about a shapeshifter who is centuries old. The genre is old fashioned Gothic although it could be classified as LGBT paranormal romance with some horror elements. It is definitely a book for adults!