V2: A Novel of World War II by Robert Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

V2 is the latest novel from Robert Harris, set in late 1944. We follow two people, a German rocket scientist, Rudi Graf, and an English intelligence officer, Kay Caton-Walsh, in alternate chapters. I’m not really sold on the alternating chapter style of narrative – I’ve seen it fail and become distracting several times – but the author makes it work here.

We follow Rudi as he helps launch V2 rockets at London from the occupied Netherlands, and we follow Kay as she joins a unit that tries to calculate the V2’s launching point based on radar data. I really don’t want to say much more than that for fear of spoiling it, but let me just say that both of the stories are very interesting and of course they are intertwined. It’s definitely a good read and it really kept my interest.

I appreciated the author’s inclusion in his Acknowledgements of a bibliography concerning the V2 and the missile campaign of 1944.